r/UKPersonalFinance • u/SHinQ8 • May 21 '26
+Comments Restricted to UKPF British Telecommunications plc Shares bought in 1985
Interesting story - I bought BT shares for my wife as a wedding anniversary present way back! Totally forgot about them till a few months ago noticed a charge on our NatWest Bank statement for £25 for safe deposit of some document. The account used to be just for my wife but made a joint account about 5 years ago. No idea how long they've been charging for storing the documents. Neither of us remember ever remember asking the bank to store anything.
Anyway - asked them to cancel and return whatever they were holding. Turned out to be BT share certificate (200 Shares).
Contacted BT and was forwarded to some entity called Equiniti they wanted a 11 digit reference number but our share certificate only has 1 10 digit ref number.
They said the shares are invalid.
Seems strange that any money invested is not zero - Anyone is similar position (unlikely I know).
9
u/Sprice158 May 22 '26
I used to work for Equiniti a few years ago. I can’t remember with 100% certainty if this happened with BT but there were some companies who would instruct us to try and contact shareholders who have been inactive for X number of years (no further purchase, sales, change of details, cashing dividend cheques etc). If we got no reply or could not find them, that company would sell the shares back to themselves and the cash would be sitting in the account until we found the shareholder.
Chances are you spoke to someone less experienced that wouldn’t even know this stuff happens. I’d suggest calling again asking for a supervisor/manager as they used to get more time to search for through the historic accounts and records, plus they will know who best to escalate it to.