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Lake Forest firm gets $8.1 million windfall
Updated: September 25, 2012 7:54PM
LAKE FOREST — Illinois State Treasurer Dan Rutherford has presented an $8.1 million check to officials at Tenneco Inc. as the result of finalized unclaimed property claims.
This sum represents the largest unclaimed asset returned by the state treasurer since the inception of the unclaimed property program, the treasurer’s office said in a press release.
The claim encompasses 45 properties transferred on behalf of the Pullman Co., which was bought by Tenneco in 1996. Tenneco, a global manufacturing company, is headquartered in Lake Forest.
“It is my pleasure to see that these claims have been finalized, and that an Illinois company now has more than $8 million back on its balance sheet,” Rutherford said in the release.
“This is good news for the Illinois economy. A secondary goal in publicizing this return is to encourage everyone — even companies and nonprofits — to check the I-Cash database to see if any unclaimed money or other assets are in their names,” he said.
The Illinois State Treasurer’s Office’s Unclaimed Property Division now oversees more than $1.6 billion in cash, plus the contents of Illinois safe deposit boxes that have been inactive for at least five years. With changes of addresses, deaths in the family, and name changes, many safe deposit boxes are forgotten about and contents are transferred to the Illinois State Treasurer’s Office.
If you’d like to discover what’s yours, go to Icash.Illinois.gov, enter your name and the names of your relatives, and see if there are any matches. If so, select those matches and begin a claim by printing the claim form.
Those without access to a printer can write to the Illinois State Treasurer’s Office to ask for any claims by name and any addresses inhabited. Contact the Unclaimed Property Division by calling (217) 785-6998 or emailing info@Icash.Illinois.gov. Searches, however, cannot be completed by telephone.
