What was they key difference between distributing the dole merger payments and distributing the dole class action lawsuit payments to the appropriate parties that made the latter more difficult? Refer to article below:

In 2013, tropical-fruit tycoon David Murdock, who was the chairman, chief executive officer and biggest shareholder of Dole Food Co., took it private for $13.50 a share. A lot of shareholders felt that that price was way too low, and that Murdock had sandbagged the shareholders by driving down the value of the company so he could buy it cheaply for himself. So they sued, and they won. In 2015, the Delaware Chancery Court ordered Murdock to pay shareholders another $2.74 a share, plus interest. There was a class action on behalf of shareholders, covering 36,793,758 shares, and after the court ruled in their favor, the class lawyers informed the shareholders and asked them to submit a form to claim their $2.74 a share. They got back claims from 4,662 shareholders for a total of 49,164,415 shares. "That figure substantially exceeded the 36,793,758 shares in the class," Delaware Vice Chancellor Travis Laster drily noted in an opinion Wednesday. Oops! Somehow shareholders owned 33 percent more Dole Food shares than there were Dole Food shares.

Huh. So. The simple explanation would be "a quarter of those people were lying," but nope. Almost all the claims were valid, or at least, "facially eligible." So the lawyers sheepishly went back to Vice Chancellor Laster to explain what happened and ask what to do about it.

What happened? Two things. The first one is just a pure pointless mess. Essentially the way everyone owns stock is:

Cede & Co., a nominee of the Depository Trust Co., owns all the stock in all the companies.

DTC keeps a list of its "participants" -- banks and brokers -- who "really" own that stock, and how much each of them own.

The participants, in turn, keep lists of "beneficial owners" -- people and funds -- who really really own the stock, and how much each of them own.

So if you own stock, what you really have is an entry in your broker's database, and your broker in turn has an entry in DTC's database, and DTC (well, Cede) has an entry in the company's database of shareholders of record. If you sell the stock, your broker takes it out of your account (at your broker), and DTC takes it out of your broker's account (at DTC), and DTC adds it to the buyer's broker's account (at DTC), and the buyer's broker adds it to the buyer's account (at the buyer's broker). As far as the company is concerned, Cede owned the stock the whole time.

If this all makes your head hurt, you are not alone. Sometimes it makes DTC's head hurt too, and it needs to lie down for a while in a dark room and listen to soothing music. DTC calls this a "chill." I am not kidding. So when there's a merger that's about to close, it's too crazy for DTC to both keep track of trades and deal with getting the merger payment to shareholders. So DTC will place a chill on the stock, and just not record trades for the three days leading up to the closing. From Wednesday's opinion :

DTC placed chills on its records for its participants positions in Dole common stock as of the close of business on November 1. A chill restricts a participants ability to deposit or withdraw the security. Once DTC initiated the chills, the participants positions in Dole common stock were locked in and could not change.

Nov. 1, 2013, was the closing date, but the chill effectively covered the three previous days:

DTCs centralized ledger did not reflect all of the trades in Dole common stock on the day of the merger or during the two days preceding it. Under the current standard of T+3 for clearing trades, DTC did not receive information about all of the transactions that took place on October 30, October 31, or November 1.

This doesn't actually mean that you couldn't trade Dole stock in the three days leading up to the merger closing. You could, and lots of people did. About 32 million shares traded in those last three days. It just means that DTC doesn't want to hear about it. DTC was chilling. Instead:

The DTC participants who facilitated transactions that had not yet cleared when the merger closed were responsible for properly allocating the merger consideration among the parties to the transactions.

As far as DTC was concerned, whoever owned shares as of the close on Oct. 29 owned the shares at the time the merger closed. If you sold your shares after that time, your broker and the buyer's broker -- the DTC participants -- had to sort that out themselves.

You can see why this would be a problem for the current Dole lawsuit. If you owned a share of Dole stock as of Oct. 30, DTC thinks you owned it at closing. If you sold the share to me on Oct. 31, my broker (and your broker) thinks that I owned it at closing. It's just one share, but it has turned into two shares as far as "facially eligible" claims go. This is a weird problem: If you owned the stock on Oct. 30, and then sold it before the closing, you're kind of a jerk for submitting a claim pretending that you owned the stock at closing. But this all happened a pretty long time ago and maybe you forgot.

Fortunately this problem is solvable. The solution is simultaneously trivial and extremely difficult. The key thing to realize is that those trades in the last three days happened, and somehow the original merger consideration -- the $13.50 a share paid on Nov. 4, 2013 -- found its way to the people who really owned the stock at the end of Nov. 1. DTC might not have had a complete and up-to-date list of them, but DTC's participants had mechanisms to get the money to the right place. (Intuitively: If Broker A sold shares to Broker B on Oct. 31, DTC would send the merger money to Broker A on Nov. 4, and Broker A would pass it along to Broker B, etc.) Whatever voodoo they did back then, they could probably do again. The problem of distributing the $2.74 can be reduced to a previously solved problem, the problem of distributing the $13.50. So it is trivial.

It's also kind of hard, in that the brokers have to go back and figure out who actually owned the shares at the time, but that's their problem. The Delaware vice chancellor concludes that for him to figure out who actually owned the shares, or for the lawyers to figure it out, "would be lengthy, arduous, cumbersome, expensive, and fundamentally uncertain," and "functionally impossible" to do "in a practical or cost- effective manner." That sounds hard! So the lawyers suggested, and the judge approved, letting the brokers figure it out instead:

Under this method, it will be up to the DTC participants and their client institutions to resolve in the first instance any issues over who should receive the settlement consideration. Shifting the burden to them is

efficient because they already had to address these issues for purposes of allocating the merger consideration. If new issues arise, the DTC participants and their client institutions have access to their own records, and they have visibility into the terms of their contractual relationships, such as the terms on which shares are borrowed. Any ensuing disputes are between the beneficial owners and their custodial banks and brokers. Those disputes should be resolved pursuant to the contractual mechanisms in the governing agreements or, if necessary, through a judicial proceeding limited to the parties.

There might be lots of issues, but they won't be the court's problem. Good solution.

But there is another problem that created extra Dole shares. This is also a mess, but not a pointless one. It's a real economic issue, and also one that people seem to get emotional about. It is: short-selling.

Some quick background. The way short-selling works is:

Mr. A owns a share of stock.

Mr. B borrows Mr. A's share of stock.

Mr. B sells the share to Mr. C.

But now Mr. A and Mr. C each own one share of stock. Where there was only one share, now there are two. A "phantom share" has been created. Well, not really. The trick to balancing the books is to remember that Mr. B owes Mr. A a share of stock. So Mr. B now owns negative one share of stock. There's a total of one share: one for A, and one for C, and negative one for B. One plus one minus one is one. It's no problem.

"But what if ...," you start to ask, and I reply: Shh, shh. It just works. What if the company pays a dividend? Well, Mr C. physically possesses the share -- don't think too hard about that metaphor -- so the company pays the dividend to Mr. C. But Mr. A also owns the share, and he wants the dividend too. But it's OK, because Mr. B owns negative one share, so he has to pay a dividend. So he pays the dividend to Mr. A. In practice, this is all intermediated through brokers, and Mr. A is unlikely to ever find out that his share was borrowed or that he got his dividend from Mr. B. For Mr. A, the whole thing just works quietly and seamlessly. It's magic. What if the company is acquired in a management buyout for $13.50 in cash? Same thing. The company sends $13.50 to Mr. C. Mr. B sends the $13.50 to Mr. A. The two owners of the one share of stock each get the full $13.50 merger price for that one share of stock. Mr. B, who is short one share of stock, pays one merger price. Everything works. It just works. It's still magic.

What if the company is acquired in a management buyout for $13.50 in cash and then, three years later, a court adds another $2.74 in cash to the merger price? Same ... wait. I have no idea. The magic might break down here. As the court points out:

The shorting resulted in additional beneficial owners who received the merger consideration, who fell within the technical language of the class definition, and who could claim the settlement consideration. Meanwhile, the lenders of the shares, not knowing that the shares were lent, also could claim the settlement consideration. This is another means by which two different claimants could submit facially valid claims for the same underlying shares.

That's basically true of the original merger consideration, too. There, brokers would owe merger consideration to people who owned more shares than actually existed, and they'd go get that extra consideration from the short sellers. Everything balanced out. Maybe that will happen here too. But it's harder. If you were short Dole Food stock on Nov. 1, 2013, you were doing it in an account with a broker. You posted collateral in that account. When it came time to collect the $13.50 from you, the broker had no problem collecting it. But that was three years ago. If the broker comes back to you now for the extra $2.74, you might feel entirely within your rights to reply "new phone who dis?" You might not have an account with that broker any more. You might not even exist anymore. (People die; hedge funds close.) You certainly haven't been posting collateral against your Dole Food short position for the last three years. That position was closed out ages ago.

Anyway this could account for millions of the phantom shares:

As of October 31, 2013, traders had shorted approximately 2.9 million shares of Dole common stock. Because the price of Dole common stock traded above the merger price through closing, it is likely that traders shorted additional shares on November 1, resulting in even more shares in short positions as of closing.

So that's a fun one! I don't know how the brokers will deal with this problem, but I will just quote the court and say: "Any ensuing disputes are between the beneficial owners and their custodial banks and brokers." Let us wash our hands of them.

Isn't this such a delightful muck? As Vice Chancellor Laster writes:

This problem is an unintended consequence of the top-down federal solution to the paperwork crisis that threatened Wall Street in the 1970s. Through the policy of share immobilization, Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission addressed the crisis using the 1970s-era technologies of depository institutions, jumbo paper certificates, and a centralized ledger.