For reasons not worth explaining, I have three Personal Crest accounts for one of the companies in which I hold shares. If I had not opted in for electronic communication, I would therefore have received three identical copies of their Annual Report, three AGM Notices, and three paper proxy voting forms.
So to save the postman some effort, and the company some money, I opted out of paper communications, i.e. opted in to electronic communication, for two of the holdings, just leaving one in paper as I prefer to read annual reports on paper.
The result this year was one complete set of paper documents, and two single page letters for the others giving me the date of the meeting and pointing to a web site where it was claimed I could “log-in” to their share portal and vote. Why they could not include a paper proxy form with those letters, which would have simplified matters, I do not know. I am not registered for the Link (formerly Capita) share portal and don’t wish to do so. I just wished to vote.
The first problem was that when I typed in the company’s name to their portal software, their software could not find it. The company has an apostrophe in its name and I had to type that in to find. So that is stupidity number one.
It then insisted I needed to register – that’s stupidity number 2 when all I wanted to do was vote. Why could they not use the same system as Equiniti who have a much simpler system? I have surely spoken in the past to Capita about this issue and still they have not fixed it.
So I phoned Link and asked them to send me a paper proxy voting form. They refused to do so. The lady I spoke to said I can only vote personal crest holdings via my Crest sponsor. Even after consulting her supervisor, she insisted that was the case. They are simply wrong as I vote my Crest holdings via post all the time, and as I have pointed out they sent me a voting form for the single “paper” holding I have which I have used.
It is very obvious that they know less about voting systems and registration than I but I will be educating the next manager at Link I speak to – there should be a call back tomorrow. If they cannot figure out any other way to solve this problem, I will tell them to convert all three holdings to “paper communication”. That should please my local council who make money from selling the waste paper of residents.
This is a typical example of the obstruction faced by private shareholders when they try to vote their shares. And don’t even talk to me about the abomination that is the nominee system that defeats most people. It is simply not good enough that in the modern age that we have such unintelligent IT systems and customer relations staff who do not seem to know their job.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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