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Do You Have Unclaimed Shares and Dividends?
From time to time, some people who invest in shares may forget to deposit their dividend cheques.
Actually, “some people” is an understatement.
More than 89,000 investors are actually owned a total of $68.3 million in unclaimed shares and dividends, and SGX is trying to locate them now.
These unclaimed assets comprise of two main categories:
- $14.6 million of SingTel shares and dividends belonging to investors without Central Depository (CDP) accounts. The 15,000 individuals who own these shares bought them at $2.00 each in the company’s 1993 IPO. The shares have returned more than twice that amount since then.
- Each year, thousands of shareholders do not cash their dividend cheques. Unclaimed dividends are returned to the relevant listed companies after six years. Currently, 74,000 investors have yet to claim $53.7 million in dividends which SGX is safe-keeping.
To check if you own any unclaimed assets, you can go to www.sgx.com/mygateway or call 6589 8039 (8.30 am to 5.00 pm Mondays-Fridays, 9.00 am to 12.30 pm on Saturdays). SGX will waive the administrative fee for the re-issuance of dividend cheques and dividend crediting until 26 January 2014.
I encourage everyone to go to the website to check for yourself and your family (you only need the NRIC number). Your parents might fall into the category of those who have some SingTel shares but do not have a CDP account.
To avoid missing your dividend payouts, you may want to consider signing up for SGX’s direct crediting service which will automatically deposit your dividends into your bank account. Sometimes, cheques can be lost in the mail and unless you track all dividend payouts diligently, you might not even know it when a cheque is not delivered.