However, Nepal might be one of those few countries where investors are neglectful about the money they invested in stocks. In developed economies, investors consider every aspect, calculate every move and estimate the rate of return of every investment they make. But in Nepal, investors are so impetuous that they invest their hard-earned money in a stock and do not bother to look back at it.
The perfect example of this can be seen by the big pile of dividends accumulated in as many as 20 commercial banks. The banks have nearly Rs 2 billion of uncollected dividends piled up as shareholders did not appear to collect them.
The aforementioned amount is of just 20 of 215 listed companies, if one adds up uncollected dividends of all listed companies, the amount will surely be huge.
Moreover, more than two dozen companies have sent a large amount of uncollected dividend to the Shareholders’ Protection Fund as the shareholders did not collect their dividends for five consecutive years.
Despite the fact that the companies are issuing public notices time and again in national level newspapers, investors have not collected their dividends.
The table shows that 20 commercial banks have more than Rs 2 billion piled up in uncollected dividends in the last five FYs.
Out of them, Agriculture Development Bank has the highest amount of Rs 710 million uncollected dividends. Given that, the bank has issued more share ownerships to rural areas of the country, the shareholders presumably did not get the information.
On the contrary, Laxmi Bank has nil amounts on such a topic. The bank informed that it fully distributed the dividend meant for its shareholders.
Another reason behind the huge pile of uncollected dividends is un-updated Demat accounts. Although, the companies repeatedly urge their shareholders to update their Demat accounts to be eligible to obtain the announced dividend, the shareholders do not updated their accounts due to which the companies failed to transfer their dividends to the shareholders' accounts.
