Noonan in tight spot over Standard Life

As an exercise in goodwill, the Standard Life €1 a share payout has fallen particularly flat for Irish shareholders, many of whom now face a significant tax bill after more than 5,000 letters managed to get "lost" in the mail for up to eight weeks.

Those shareholders will not have been mollified by news of a letter (hopefully)winging its way to them which amounts to a shrug of the shoulders by the company in which they have invested over its inability to deliver on its return of value promise.

Standard Life is now saying it can do no more and that it is up to the Irish shareholders to press their case with Revenue.

For its part, Revenue says it is constrained by legislation and cannot simply reclassify payments so as to make them tax-free. Fair enough.

Last year, in similar circumstances, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan announced relief for thousands of Vodafone (Eircom) shareholders. They too had lost out after mail mysteriously failed to arrive at an English address. The Minister has said he is not minded to make the same provision for Standard Life.

In part, he said it would not be appropriate for the State to make specific legislative provision to address financial losses caused by “the administrative arrangements put in place by those commercial companies”.

In this case, the difficulties were, in fact, caused by the failure of either Royal Mail or An Post to manage basic letter delivery. They have admitted that, though neither can or will identify where exactly the problem occurred.

Given that no UK shareholders suffered similar problems and that the root cause of the Vodafone fiasco was also a failure of letters from Irish shareholders to reach their destination in a timely fashion – a problem again unique to Irish investors – there is at least a strong suspicion that the problem could lie within An Post.

And, as An Post is a commercial semi-state business, Mr Noonan might yet have difficulty explaining to shareholders why he will not act to mitigate inadvertent personal losses that may well be attributable to problems with a public service.