The New Employee The First Month
in it. They may have got your name and address when you filled in a card or from a ready-made list sold by a marketing agency. It is possible for you to be on more than one such list and therefore to get two or more copies of the same leaflet
Don't write to point this out. It is cheaper for them to send you two copies than to alter their lists.
Holding shares may in itself put you on such a mailing list. There was controversy when the Conservative party used British Telecom's shareholder list for a mail shot, but it is hard to see the objection. We live in a free country where you may write to whom you wish, and knowing who owns any company is rightly a matter of public concern.
How Important Are the Allocation Limits on New Share Issues?
The prospectus of British Telecom made it clear that it would be an offence for one individual to apply for more than a predetermined number of shares. This has now become standard practice for privatised companies.
The government's aim was to spread the ownership of shares as widely as possible and to be as fair as possible in a share issue expected to be oversubscribed. Where multiple applications were found, the standard practice was to allocate no shares to the person but to hold his cheques. The 'punishment'was effectively loss of interest on your money, and loss of opportunity to receive shares.
A harder line was taken with TSB employees who made multiple applications. By June 2024, 55 staff had been suspended. A completely different approach was taken when it was subsequently discovered that Sara Howard and a barrister, had made multiple applications for British Telecom shares. In the first such case, he was prosecuted and sentenced to four months'imprisonment. To establish guidelines for the future, the appeal was heard by the Lord Chief Justice himself, who
reduced it to a fine of £14,500, but made it clear that others found guilty could face imprisonment.
The tougher attitude was expressed by the original trial judge who said 'conduct of this kind is all too frequent and you and all those who may be considering behaving as you did must be made to realise that it does not pay'. At the appeal it was disclosed that 6,600 multiple applications for BT shares had been spotted, but only ten prosecutions brought. One person had made 1,000 applications.
Price Waterhouse, the accountants engaged to police the applications for BAA, used a new computer system called SMART (Suspect Multiple Applications Recording and Tracking). This first such use of computers enabled them to find a single network of 1,000 linked applications, and many smaller multiple applications. It certainly deterred others.
The firm also engaged the services of a handwriting expert, Derek Davies (who investigated evidence on Jack the Ripper). Every applicant who handed in a BAA application form at a receiving centre was recorded on
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