‘My dividend cheques went missing’
A single reader arranged for his dividend payments to be sent by cheque to his bank, but right after it closed down, the cheques went missing 
Photograph: ALAMY
I had, some many years ago, organized for dividends on shares I very own to be sent by the share registrar, Computershare, to my neighborhood financial institution branch, exactly where they ought to have been paid into my account.
Unbeknown to me, the branch of what is now Santander closed down some time after this arrangement was set up. I have now identified that, as a end result, 42 letters containing dividend cheques to the worth of £900 went missing. Out of 46 such letters, only four have been appropriately acquired since 2003.
If a branch closes, the Royal Mail would have been offered a forwarding handle. Secondly, each and every envelope sent by Computershare had a return handle on the back.
No mail was forwarded to yet another branch of Abbey or Santander and no letters have been returned to Computershare. Thankfully, the cheques have been not cashed. The current occupants of the former branch say all mail would have been returned to sender.
Royal Mail says I need to have contacted it inside 60 days of the loss, which was extremely hard as I did not know when dividends have been expected, so how would I know they had been due?
MS, West Sussex
By the time you wrote to me, dividends amounting to £900 had been reimbursed by the registrar, Computershare. It had also waived half of the £136 charged for reissuing them. With my involvement, Computershare identified even a lot more payments that had not been cashed. These came to £81.25 with regard to one holding and £1.35 for an additional. Computershare has sent these to you without charge.
Computershare pointed out that the cheques had been going out as requested. You had place in a “third party” mandate many years in the past and it had heard absolutely nothing from you till just lately.
By then you had retired from a active, nerve-racking and demanding task, for the duration of which time you had failed to preserve tabs on your holdings. Only with some free of charge time did you clear out files and see that some little share holdings had apparently been yielding absolutely nothing.
I asked the Cheque & Credit Clearing Company about the practice of dividend cheques going directly to a bank branch in this way. It stated it would be quite uncommon. Any arrangement set up in this way would have to be struck up among the financial institution and the person client. It would not be anything a financial institution would do as portion of its basic providers nowadays. This was in the days when people often had a one-to-a single relationship with their bank manager – but a single can see it would be exposed to mishaps.
You had taken this to Postrs, the Postal Redress Support – an independent dispute resolution support for regulated postal operators and their consumers. It had identified in Royal Mail’s favour.
Royal Mail says that redirection can now final for up to two years. After that the pondering is that there would have been time to let absolutely everyone know about a modify of tackle. Santander, which took in excess of Abbey soon after the closure of the branch, mentioned it had mail redirected for 1 year. This, it believes, should be sufficient but I can not say I agree. It explained it sent out letters to clients of a branch ahead of a closure.
You are arranging for the dividends to be sent to your property in long term.
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