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Part 2 - My Friend with the Nortel Shares

[lamystique]

He was injured one winter skiing and after a rather lengthy and partial recovery he found himself without a job and very little money. This was after he had 'immigrated' to the west here from Ontario where he was employeed full time as a mining engineer, student, and father/husband. So for some years he worked as a vendor of fast foods. He made and sold falafels from his 'VW' microbus. He made a good living doing this for awhile; however the winter months were slow for business so he went to Mexico. While he was in Mexico he inherited 1600 shares of BCE from his family and these shares were worth about $32 each. That was almost ten years ago. During his stays in Mexico which lasted for more than one year, there came in the mail a letter from BCE. There was nothing else on the envelope other than BCE. I put all his mail into a special box for him so when he returned from Mexico he could have all his mail at once. In all those days he was in Mexico he did not once phone, nor did he write very often, but I was his sole point of mail delivery service. He advised me to open all the important looking mail. So that is what I did. One day there was a letter from BCE and I was not sure what it was. Who was BCE? I though it was junk mail. I did not throw it away for some reason. I put it away in the book until some letters came from a law firm in a foreign country. I was sure that that letter was important, so I opened it. It was another inheritance. But not a very large one, nor a small one, but the letter was urgent since he had to approve of the 'settlement' as requested by the other family members or none of them would be entitled to their portion of the inheritance. So this was 'imperative' now for me to locate my friend in Mexico. I scrambled through my boxes of letters and postcards and found some postales carjetas a Mexico with addresses. I quickly wrote down the addresses and sent a couple of letters off. I neve did get a reply, but by the time that I should have I contacted his brothers and some of his friends in the US and Canada. And gave them the news and information. Then one day I did get a call by telephone from him. I was happy about that because hardly anyone had heard from him in the last 5 months or so. So I was relieved. Then I described the situation, and that he had to correspond with the firm. Prior to that telephone I decided to open up the white plain envelope with BCE on it. I opening it up and was shocked. I thought this was a gimmick. The contents consisted of 1600 shares issued to my friend from a company calling it self BCE. That must be 'Bell Canada Limited' and I asked him about it. The shares were still worth $30 so dollars since that envelope had sat in my box for almost one year prior to opening it up. Wow was he surprised because he now had 3200 shares, or about the same value as 160,000 falafels. Anyway I kept the share certificate in a safe place until he returned in the following summer. Then my friend kept returning for longer periods of time to Mexico. Then recently he moved back to be here for awhile. One day he told me that the shares of Nortel were spun off to the shareholders as a seperate company, this was as a tax dodge for the BCE shareholders. At the time nortel was not worth $120 but much less. In no time at all did those shares appreciate to that though. The initial inheritance consisted of less than $32,000 in total I remember. I advised him all the time to keep those shares and hold them right from the beginning even though the earnings from being a vendadora of fast foods was not paying out a lot of profit....At one time Human Resources refused to help him out because he had reported that he owned a few shares in BCE. So this made it very hard on him when money was hard to obtain. The government said that in order for him to get one cent in support while he was healing from his injury skiing he was to sell the shares in BCE. I told him he might be best off putting them in his one of his childrens name....