“When mailing out hard copy Annual Reports does each Nominee company get a copy for each entry on the Share Register or just one copy per Nominee company irrespective the number of times that Nominee company name appears on the Share Register?
My Registrars have indicated that the latter is normal practice which means that the Nominee companies will not be sent sufficient copies to pass onto the beneficial owners (even if they were minded to). If this is the case, how to Company Secretaries deal with beneficial shareholders who don’t get their copy?”
We do the later, just send one copy to the Nominee company. Only exception is where receive a nomination of person to enjoy infromation rights in a prescribed form see s146/147 of the CA2006 and then the registrar keeps these requests on a a separate list and provide hard copy documents until the nomination is terminated. Scale : we have circa 6000 beneficial shareholders and we have had circa 20 requests for hard copy document from nominated persons and about 50 ahve requested electronic notification of document availabilty.
The latter is normal practice. We do, however, also operate a mailing list (also administered by our Registrar) and if a nominee ask for more that the normal copy we add them to the mailing list. The issue has reduced in recent years as people have increasing access to information online. We are more commonly asked to reduce the number of copies nominees receive rather than increase them.
Hi – the latter is certainly normal. Fund managers should be lisiaing with their cliients as appropriate to define what they would like to receive or how they would like to vote at AGM etc…. With companies moving more an more to electronic communications it has made the issues with nominee accounts easier to manage as the information is freely available and we encourage our Registrars to manage queries on our behalf. Underlying shareholders can contact the Registrar direct to request hard copy documents and they should retain those requests on a separate mailing list.
I always have seen this as an issue between the underlying shareholder and the nominee. We would just send a separate copy to any shareholder who asked specifically but otherwise do nothing.
Associated issues arise on voting and really the shareholder has to sort this out as they put the nominee arrangements in place.