Hi Taoist,Last year I and a fellow Hot Copperite had cause to...

Hi Taoist,

Last year I and a fellow Hot Copperite had cause to send a letter to shareholders of another company to enlist their support in voting "No" to certain resolutions proposed by that company.

In order to achieve that objective you need to obtain a copy of the register. We had 5% of the shares and requested a copy. It cost my fellow HC approximately $345.00 for the privilege (charged apparently by the Registry Managers - or so we were told). The law in fact requires that a company keep a copy of the register in their offices at all times - or at least the office of the Company Secretary. That, of course, would require an update on a daily basis - but even then it will be three to five days out of date if you count T+3 plus admin days.

Even then we were stuffed around considerably and excuses were made as to why it wasn't ready when it should have been provided. We eventually collected the register from the Co Sec's office and it was not in a format that was readily useable i.e. database like Access or even listed like Excel - instead it was a pdf which was difficult to work with.

However,

I contacted RSL and prepared for the worst as we had experienced with this other company, even prepared to fork out $345.00 for the privilege. I have a large holding of RSL shares and explained my current holding. They checked on that. They then provided me a few days later, with a copy of the register in a format that was sortable, readable, printable, etc.

Champion work!! Very very pleased with the way they handled it.

They have had requests in the past from people claiming to be shareholders, and when checked, found that in fact, these persons did not have shares.

Why did I obtain the copy of the register in the first place? Because people were saying that the top 20 were tightly held. I realised that the top 20 did not necessarily have to be tightly held as they did not hold (in some cases) more than 5% and therefore did not have to alert the market that they were trading their shares. This in fact proved to be the case.

As is often the case when you do your own research you come up with a more correct answer.

Cheers,
T