Last chance to get money from the coupon. Thousands of Czechs have already applied for the shares

The search for forgotten money, for example for the 70-year-old pensioner Mrs. Danuša from the Znojmo region, already had a happy ending. Her computer application found an account for shares and dividends from them for 239 thousand crowns. “I remembered that I had not settled part of my coupon investment in the past,” said Ms. Danuse. Because it currently has no “important use” for money, it will partly save it and partly dedicate it to its grandchildren.

Hundreds of thousands of sums have already been found for more people, the highest amount in one account even reached 407 thousand crowns. On average, however, about 20,000 crowns are spent on each forgotten account. Hundreds of thousands are usually in accounts containing shares traded on the Prague Stock Exchange – for example, shares of ČEZ, O2 or Komerční banka. So far, the project has found these shares on 12 percent of “forgotten” accounts.

But sometimes people are happy for a much smaller amount. One of the successful clients was a lord from one of the South Moravian villages affected by the recent tornado. “Shares worth 15,000 crowns were suitable for repairing the roof. Of course, we left them to him free of charge, “Surmař told Deník.

Some experts praise the approach

In cases where the forgotten shares publicly traded on the stock exchange can be found, the project creators offer redemption to their owners. “On average, we charge ten percent of the total value of the found property for the service,” Daniel Surmař, who invented the project, told Deník.

His first motivation was to find out if his mother had any forgotten money from privatization. “Unfortunately, we did not find anything for her, but maybe my aunt did,” said Surmar. “And in my girlfriend’s family, even four out of five people we tried to look for had a forgotten account,” he said.

Coupon privatization in the then Czechoslovakia took place in two waves in 1992 and 1994. Each adult citizen could buy a coupon book and ten coupons in it, which totaled 1,035 crowns. Through them, he could cheaply buy a stake in shares selected until then by state-owned enterprises. However, after privatization, many of them were tunneled by their management or new owners.

Due to the fact that almost 30 years have passed since the “coupon”, most of the clients of the service are older people with an average age of 62 years. However, more than a fifth of them get help with registration from younger people who better understand modern technology. More than 15,000 people have helped their parents or grandparents to find money. The thing is not lost even if the original owner of the coupon book has died in the meantime. Ten percent of those interested in lost money are their heirs.

Surmař expects that reports of the money found will motivate other interested parties, and the total number of clients of his service will climb to 200 to 300 thousand. Some experts praise his approach. “I think that this project is very useful, and for those people who can’t find it themselves, no one else is able to help today,” Karel Zeman from the University of Economics in Prague told Deník recently. “Older people in particular have always been worried about that, because it’s not an easy thing to do, so they don’t know it,” he added.

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