Legal Question in Wills and Trusts in Virginia

Re: corporate stock is missing/destroyed

If you are taking them to court, presumably, you have retained the services of an attorney to represent you and who should be better able to answer your questions than any attorney on the BBS

who is not as privy to all of the relevant facts associated with your case.

Re: corporate stock is missing/destroyed

Wow. You ask a lot of good questions, but I think none of the questions raised have quite enough information to give a meaningful answer. Part of the problem is that so much is going on here, that the information each slice of the overall loaf is very minimal. First and foremost we have to start with asking whether your father died as a citizen of Virginia, since otherwise I'm not allowed to give an opinion on legal matters in another State (since I'm licensed in Virginia only). Second, you raise questions about what is missing, suggesting that there is a lack of accounting. The Commissioner of Accounts under the Circuit Court (if this is Virginia) would require strict and complete inventories of everything, where it went, etc. If they never filed (most people don't know they are supposed to), a request for compliance to the Commissioner of the Accounts could bring the considerable power of the proper authorities to bear on that portion of the problem. That's what the Commissioner of Accounts is there for, to make sure everything is accounted for. That's their job. Third, you raise a number of questions about the evidentiary record of the corporation. I don't see any reason why the answer would automatically come down on either one side or the other. I think this is going to be very much dependent on how much documentation you can scrape together, and how much corroborating testimony. The real world runs on documents, but the judicial system puts a ton of weight on live testimony. But obviously the more testimony to confirm the same point the better. The mere absence of shares of stock in and of themselves do not automatically dictate the outcome. The question is whether one can prove that you held the shares of stock. For example, the State Corporation Commission may show that X shares of stock are authorized, but if they are nto counting your shares, only Y shares are accounted for, leaving a serious question of what happened to the other X-Y shares (the shares you actually have). Your legal rights to shares of stock exist regardless of whether the certificates are destroyed or lost. The problem is proving it. Similarly, did the corporation ever pay dividends? Presumably there would be checks paid and/or Form 1099's showing the distribution of dividends. The mathematical analysis of the dividends paid would substantiate who held how many shares of stock, because it is mandatory that every share of stock in the same class receive an equal dividend. Things like that.

I would love to help you with something like this. I am quite inexpensive as an attorney by keeping my expenses low. However, you are rather far away. If by chance you have an empty room down there, I might actually consider working on your case just for the change of pace and seeing another part of the State.