KATIE MORLEY INVESTIGATES

CONSUMER CHAMPION OF THE YEAR If a company has let you down, Katie is here to fight your corner

LETTER OF THE WEEK I forgot to cash in my kids’ £120,000 inheritance

I am at my wits’ end in trying to conclude the administration of the estate of my late aunt. The main beneficiaries of her estate are my wife and our two grown-up children, but I am joint executor of the will and have been handling it.

My aunt died in 1997, but life got in the way and I didn’t get around to sorting out the inheritance. I only applied for probate last year. Now both my children have been diagnosed with a life-changing illness and they need the money to put towards buying a flat.

My aunt’s estate is worth about £135,000 and most of it was made up of shares in Rentokil, the pest control service. When she died the shares were worth about £80,000 but now they are worth more like £120,000.

When I recently tried to claim them, Rentokil said that, because they had been dormant for so long, it had given them away to a “good cause”. So, on the face of it, Rentokil has taken £120,000 from the estate.

I am amazed that shares can be confiscated in this way without ensuring that the existing shareholder has been made aware. Consumers need to be alerted that a company can suddenly change its rules and confiscate shares. I only received one letter about this last year and it wasn’t even from Rentokil – it was from another company altogether. I am sure that Rentokil has a reserve fund from the sale of proceeds of shares from which it can make good any late claim.

ANON

I must admit I have struggled to get my head around your case. One of my first thoughts was why on earth would you leave it so long to cash in the estate? Your aunt died 23 years ago and yet you’ve only just decided to claim these shares, you say, because life got in the way and you’ve been very busy. Two decades is certainly a long time to be so busy.

I asked you outright, were you so wealthy when she died that this money meant nothing to you? No, you said. You’ve always been comfortable, but you’re not superrich by any means. For your children especially, a sum of £120,000 is a lifechanging amount of money to lose, so I wanted to understand fully what Rentokil had done to make you aware that this would eventually happen if you did not take action.

You say all you received was one letter, which came early last year. You say it appeared to come from a different company, ProSearch, which you thought might be a claims management company, so you ignored it. Given the large sum

Write to Katie Morley, Telegraph Money, The Daily Telegraph, 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0DT

Please do not send original documents. Include an address, phone number and separate notes addressed to all organisations authorising them to talk to Katie. For full terms see p7 or visit telegraph.co.uk/go/ consumerchampion. You can also email kminvestigates@ telegraph.co.uk involved, I felt one letter wasn’t enough to inform you that the shares would be sold, so I asked Rentokil to provide me with a breakdown of exactly what correspondence it had sent you over the years.

Rentokil provided me with a timeline of events, showing that it was first notified of your aunt’s passing three years after her death, but that that was the last time you contacted the firm. Between 2000 and 2009, Rentokil says it sent 27 pieces of correspondence to your address, none of which you responded to.

In the absence of any communication from you or your wife, in 2018 Rentokil appointed ProSearch, a specialist search company, to try to reunite you with the unclaimed assets. ProSearch obtained a copy of your aunt’s death certificate and wrote to you, the death certificate informant, advising you that the shares would be redistributed if you did not act.

Six of these letters were sent to your address. The very last, which appears to be the one you say you did receive, was marked “final communication”. Yet despite all this, you still did not act in time. I put this to you and you were adamant that you did not receive the other 32 letters. I have double-checked with Rentokil and they were all sent to the correct address. Quite honestly, I struggle to believe that they were sent but not received.

As a consumer champion, I form judgments based on evidence, but instinct also heavily shapes the way I conduct my investigations. And my instinct told me that something about this did not feel right.

I decided to look into your background and found that you used to be a relatively high-profile public figure. You hadn’t mentioned this before, although I wouldn’t necessarily have expected you to, as it wasn’t relevant.

But while trawling through old clippings, I made a shocking

Dear readers, if you’re anything like me you’ll be craving an escape from all the bad news surrounding the virus outbreak. I hope this page can give you a welcome break. With this in mind, I wanted to let you know about something that lifted my spirits this week.

You may remember AF of Suffolk, whose letter I responded to a couple of weeks ago. She had been through a messy divorce and lost more than £54,000 to a wicked banking scam. Following my intervention, Lloyds refunded all the lost money. She was so relieved to get it back, as were her family, who had lent her the funds.

Imagine my delight when her family got in touch to say they had donated £1,500 of the retrieved money to people in their village who had lost their jobs in recent days. Their donation will make a real difference and I hope it will inspire others who can afford to be generous. Now more than ever we must cherish acts of kindness, large or small.

Telegraph readers’ kind gift to struggling locals