By Ian Pollock BBC News personal finance reporter

Mark Hickey is not impressed

An investor with Standard Life will challenge its forthcoming flotation in the Scottish courts because it has taken too long to tell him how it worked out his windfall share allocation.

Mark Hickey, from Woodford Green in north-east London, has been paying into two Standard Life endowment policies since the mid 1980s.

Last month, he started asking how it had calculated his variable allocation of 639 shares.

With just a few days to go before next Sunday's deadline for postal votes, Standard Life has still not done this.

So, Mr Hickey has written to complain to the Court of Session, Scotland's top civil court, which will have to give final approval to the firm's demutualisation.

He said: "If you can't tell people if their allocation is correct, they won't know whether to vote in favour or not."

"I'm not suggesting anything nefarious is going on - they don't seem to have got their act together," he explained.

Calculating the shares

Mark has been allocated 824 shares in total for his conventional endowment, including the flat-rate allocation for all eligible members.

How they could have made the calculations in the first place, yet have no record of how it was done on an individual basis? Mark Hickey

Standard Life's document "Proposal for Members and Policy holders", sent out to members, has a section called "How the variable allocation was calculated."

This explains that, for conventional with-profits policies, the sum of the accumulated bonuses is multiplied by a factor.

This, in turn, is based on the length of time the policy has been invested, the type of policy and the overall term of the policy.

When Mark asked exactly what this factor was, he was directed to a demutualisation calculation manual on the company's web site.

This states that the calculation should be worked out using "the factor from the relevant factor table determined by reference to the month and year of the calculation start date and the maturity year".

So, where is this table of factors?

Not on the Standard Life website.

According to the insurer's press office, it is simply too big and complicated to display for web users and can only be examined at some Standard Life offices.

Court of Session

Mr Hickey doesn't fancy taking a day off to traipse along to a Standard Life office and plough through a set of mathematical tables.

Court of Session, Parliament House, Edinburgh

He would prefer a simple answer to his question.

But it seems that the insurer's own staff have been having difficulty revealing the original calculations.

Mark was told that a repeat calculation could not be sent to him because all documentation had to be approved by the Court of Session.

Or alternatively that no more additional information could be sent out.

He is not impressed: "I find it very difficult to understand that they are having such a problem explaining this and wonder how they could have made the calculations in the first place, yet have no record of how it was done on an individual basis."

Following an approach from the BBC, Standard Life has now sent Mr Hickey a letter and a CD-Rom showing the factors that were applied to his policies and the way they were used to calculate his share allocation.

They have also repeated the invitation to scrutinise the tens of thousands of factors at a London office of the company.

Despite the insurer describing all this as a "personal service", Mr Hickey isn't impressed as - at the time of writing - he hasn't yet received this extra information.

"This was all about not having the information in time to vote. I've got to post my vote in time for this coming Sunday," he complained.

Unhelpful?

Standard Life denied it had been unwilling to help Mr Hickey.

In the UK alone, there are 51 different types of policy that its customers may hold.

A spokesman pointed out it had set up a telephone helpline for members right from the start of the demutualisation process which had answered thousands of calls over the last few weeks.

He also pointed out that an independent actuary had approved the way the share allocation was calculated.

"Considerable effort and expertise has gone into answering questions," the spokesman said.

The Court of Session in Edinburgh will consider Mark's written complaint early in June if the insurer gets its 75% yes vote for demutualisation.

Update

Mr Hickey received the CD-Rom and letter yesterday, Thursday 25 May.

He is now happy that his variable share allocation has been calculated in line with the formula and factor tables used by Standard Life.