Is my £22k bond now worthless?

My Barclays self-select Isa is made up largely of shares but with a few corporate bonds, including one of Barclays’ own.

I bought this bond for £20,000 plus £65 commission in 2010. It was described as inflation-linked, paying interest annually of the greater of the Retail Prices Index or 3pc, and listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Its value was shown and interest credited regularly until the introduction of the Smart Investor account.

According to the last statement the bond was worth £21,766 under the old system.

In my Smart Investor online statement since then, however, it has been shown as having nil value. In other words it is now apparently worth nothing. MU, LONDON

You are 85 and most of your savings are held in your Barclays Isa.

You had phoned and written to Barclays about the disappearing bond three months before you wrote to me.

The responses had given no explanation or prospect, you feared, of the record of the bond’s value being corrected.

Barclays had offered £250 for compensation, which you rejected because you wanted to see your bond displayed at its proper value before agreeing redress.

Further to my involvement your bond at last reappeared on the Isa statement.

Things, though, were still not quite as they should be. Disconcertingly the figure shown was five times as much as the bond was worth. This technical glitch, I understand, has now been adjusted.

Why this happened has not been made clear. A Barclays spokesman said: “We acknowledge that Mr U had experienced problems with viewing his price feed on his Smart Investor platform. We have rectified this now.

“In recognition of the distress and inconvenience this matter has caused, we have offered Mr U a gesture of goodwill.”

It turned out that you had been sent two sums of £200 both under the guise of goodwill. One of these payments was a credit of fees you would have had anyway.

I pressed for more and another £50 was paid. for 30 years.

During a recent house move they resurfaced. Greatly to my surprise, a web search revealed that the company had morphed into something else with a share price of around £35 per share.

I recently sent the administrator screenshots of my original certificates, but it stated that it was unable to find any record of my holding and suggested that the shares may have been sold, transferred or cancelled. Well, I certainly haven’t sold or transferred them.

Each share certificate has a unique reference number so how can it not have any historical records? The Financial Ombudsman Service couldn’t help. PJ, HANTS From memory you think your original outlay for this holding had been between £200 and £300.

Your holding is now looked after by Link Asset Services, formerly Capita Asset Services, and has been whittled down to less than one share following successive corporate actions. It is therefore worth nothing.

You had four share certificates, the earliest being for 1,000 shares dated Oct 22 1987.

In 1988 there was a share consolidation on the basis that for every five shares originally held, one was received in its place. This brought your holding down to 200 shares.

Additional shares you purchased in accordance

with the warrants took it to 296 shares.

In 1989 there was a 10 to one share consolidation reducing the holding to 29 shares.

Finally in 1994 there was a further consolidation. The terms this time were that each holder received one share for every 150 they had held. You did not have enough to get a new share and so your holding reached a nil balance.

Link Asset Services said “regretfully”, as the events took place many years ago, it was unable to state exactly what correspondence was sent at the time.

A spokesman said it has spoken to you to explain the consolidation and apologised if you were not made aware of the full