missing

November 16, 1999

Major Business News

John Hancock Widens Search
For Missing Policyholders

By DEBORAH LOHSE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. has pushed back a key deadline
for some policyholders to make a stock-or-cash choice in the company's
planned conversion to stock ownership. The problem: The giant Boston insurer
must try yet again to locate some of the hundreds of thousands of its three
million policyholders.

The company's inability to track down these customers -- most of them holders
of burial policies with face amounts well under $1,000 -- comes despite a
series of location efforts since May 1998. But now, a top Massachusetts's state
official wants the company to take still more steps to find those missing in
action. So the company has decided to take its list of as many as 400,000
policyholders whose whereabouts are unknown and send it to officials
nationwide, asking for their help in locating them, using state records.

The move came after the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth
volunteered to vet Hancock's MIA list against state records and did so-finding
addresses for more than 2,100 likely policyholders. Those people are probably
eligible to get a minimum of 17 John Hancock shares apiece, representing their
ownership stake in the mutual insurer, as part of the company's planned
"demutualization."

The secretary also found addresses for an additional 14,400 likely
policyholders who apparently died without their heirs ever filing claims.

'No Incentive' to Be Lax

The company said that it has "a real interest" in locating every possible
policyholder, as the company is required to set aside the collective value of the
ownership stake of any missing policyholders. If they aren't located in three to
seven years, a spokesman said, the money reverts back to the states where the
policyholders last resided. "We have to distribute 100% of the company
anyway, so we have no incentive" to be lax about finding missing policyholders,
a spokesman said.

Time to Make Choice

The company said policyholders who are found through states' efforts will have
until Dec. 31, rather than Nov. 30, to choose cash or stock for their ownership
stake. The company may give even more time to policyholders reached late in
the process.

Policyholders won't have extra time to vote on the demutualization. That
deadline will still be Nov. 30. The company hopes to distribute the shares to
policyholders and sell an estimated $2 billion of stock in an initial public offering
sometime in the first quarter.

John Hancock said that in the course of contacting policyholders, it already had
run across estates of about 10,000 to 20,000 policyholders whose heirs didn't
know that such policies existed. The company has paid over $15 million to the
estates of such policyholders in recent months, the spokesman said.

The type of burial policies at issue haven't been sold by John Hancock since
1968. In decades earlier, they were sold by agents going door to door in
working-class neighborhoods, and customers paid a few dollars a year in
premiums. In 1985, the company declared all such policies to be paid up.

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