cancelling a contract note for sale of shares

[viztopia]

I sold my shares in a compny last October. It wass my first time buying and selling so i was not familliar with all the requirements. I mislaid one of the share certificates and between requesting a replacement certificate/christmas postage and post been mislaid the sale still hasnt gone through. the upside of this is that the shares have increased by €3,000 in value since i sold them. every so often i get a letter from the share dealers saying that i will be responsible for any loss in value of the shares if the sale doesnt go through. i had sent them the missing cert just before christmas and i called today to see if they have received it and they havent. I asked could i cancel the sale and they couldnt give me a straight answer. i asked to speak to some one who could tell me and they dodged the question. does anyone know if i can?

 

[mercman]

No you can't cancel the transaction. This is the whole purpose of a Contract Note. It is what it says -- a contract.

This is the entire purpose of Nominee accounts. The shares are placed in an account controlled by the broker. They then know that they have the shares and operate on your instructions. In reality they should have refused to deal for you if they were not in possession of the certificates. Keeping it simple, your shares are now owned by somebody else.

I'd say this is going to cost you unfortunately.

 

[Palerider]

O.P said he had to submit the share certs to the broker so this could not relate to a nominee account, my experience has always been that the broker would not do the trade without being in possession of the share cert so I would say they are relying on your goodwill to provide it which in my view you should anyway as presumably you were satisfied with the price on the day you placed the order to sell.

Remember the sale has crystallised, the share cert is needed to transfer ownership of the amount of shares you sold on the day to the new buyer, it is a real and tangible transaction.