“We are currently, via Capita, trying to achieve payment into court of a number of dissentient shareholder funds that are more than 12 years old.
The cut off date for claiming payments directly from Capita was 12 months ago and we are being advised that the Court is being “difficult” ( apparently on a point of principle about “commerciality” ) about accepting these funds from Capita. We are told that Capita have had to meet with Chief Master Winegarten to try to progress matters but that the courts seem in no hurry to resolve their concerns. Clearly, beneficiaries that have come out of the woodwork in the last 12 months are getting restless since they now can’t get hold of their funds until either the funds are accepted by the Court or we rescind the application.
Are we alone in this, or is anyone else experiencing similar problems paying into court either through Capita, or any other registrar?”
We’ve just recently successfully paid dissentient funds into court. A tortuous admin process but we didn’t come up against the issues mentioned by the questioner. We managed the process ourselves rather than have the Registrar do it |(for which they wanted to charge).
I have just completed an exercise on one of our dissentient registers – with Capita as it happens. It was a long winded and frustrating process but we got there in the end, so it is still possible to have the funds accepted into court.
However on another of our dissentient registers we came up against the “commerciality” argument and have decided not to proceed with the application. To be fair the register comprised only one member and so I suppose the court did have a point.
I would be happy to introduce you to the contact at Capita who dealt with our application, if David cam put us in touch.
When Capita was our registrar around 8 years ago I investigated the possibility of paying the outstanding balances for some of our old dissenter registers into court. Ihave to say that there was very little enthusiasm on Capita’s part as they didn’t seem to have the necessary expertise. I had similar problems with Computershare. It seems to be an area where there is plenty of theory but little has been achieved. We now have a register with Equiniti who seem more confident in this area so I’m going to try to pay some of the old balances into court next year. As the number of dissenters is only going to increase, perhaps this is an issue we could discuss at one of our meetings?
Sorry – not much help but you’re not alone!
We’ve had legal advice on this topic recently and are having one final go at contacting these shareholders before making the application (as our solicitors said we needed to show that we had made a recent attempt to do so).
I’d be happy to share our legal advice with you if David puts us in touch with one another.