Hanover claim
 

If you know anyone who lost money with the above clowns please advise them to contact 'Turner Hopkins Sols at law' (just google them they are in Auck.)as they are getting a class action agin the trustees who should have stopped us from having our money wasted and squandered.

Did you know the shares we were given at a value of 20.7 cents in lieu of the debt owed us are now only worth 1.2cents?? Before the take over they were at a heady 37cents. A few years before at $3.50ish:eek:.

I sold mine ASAP, really, really ASAP yet in the few days it took for us to be allowed to go to market they had fallen another 50%...so I got just 10 cents.

People are still selling them at 1.2 cents..in BIG blocks.

And they say NZ is corruption free?? Corruption free my arse.

Re: Hanover claim
 

Who said NZ is corruption free? NZ has one of the least regulated financial systems in the World. As for Hanover, there's an old saying about fools and their money. Hanover was clearly not a safe bet, yet amateur investors lined up to sink their savings into it because the return looked tempting. Once it was exposed as the Ponzi scheme it was, these same investors, faced with the opportunity to bounce Hanover into bankruptcy, lined up again and voted for the moritorium! This effectlively let the owners keep the cash while they worked out plan "C", when these same investors bent over once again to vote for the Allied Farmers deal. This meant that the terms of the moritorium, which would have required Hotchin and Watson to pay back something like $80m, were cancelled and these two got away with it again. The last no-brainer was when it turned out that the loan book (made up mainly of capitilized interest loans to iffy property developments) acquired by Allied Farmers was a big steaming turd worth a fraction of what the paid for it. The connection between Hanover, Greg Muir (ex Hanover chairman) and John Loughlin (chairman of Allied Farmers and, until recently, chairman of Tru-Test, as such Greg Muir's boss) has been missed by most too.

So, sorry if I seem unsympathetic, but if you're going to dabble in the money markets, do your homework or risk losing your shirt. As for Hotchin and Watson, only time will tell. Whether they did anything illegal is yet to be decided - as I've said before, in the UK, paying yourself a $90m dividend when the company is insolvent woukd be considered not legal, but in NZ it seems to be more of a grey area.

Re: Hanover claim
 

Er the 13% at Bridgecorp was tempting but obviously dodgy. Hanover hoodwinked me and MANY other way shrewder people that they were low risk. FYI the interest they offered (just 2% over the banks) was the lowest being offered. Hanover sold themselves with anchor man Richard Long as a 100% safe bet. So it was not greed or stupidity..more like a shite commerce comission and crappy regulation. And a company run by a couple of greedy business men with zero morals. Cheers for your input.

Re: Hanover claim
 

I think Hanover and the other finance companies were very well marketed and offered a very good return, which for some people would and did prove to very tempting. Some spread their "risk" between various finance companies, only to lose everything.

We know someone, that persuaded their mother who lived in Germany, to take a mortgage in Germany and invest the money into Nathan's Finance. They could borrow at 2.5% (I would kill to have that mortgage rate) and get 8.45% return, easy money. What a mess that turned out to be......

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but the fact that these companies turned out to run by a load of Auckland wideboys, is not so surprising. What does surprise me, was the lack of regulation and so far....lack of accountability.

Genesis it must be a bitter pill to swallow and I hope that it's not effected your long term finances to much.

Re: Hanover claim
 

How is it that the government can bail out AMI yet hang investors like you out to dry Genesis?

For what it's worth I think you've been treated very shabbily and so have the Pike River investors and creditors.

Re: Hanover claim
 

I guess its simply cos SCF were covered by the guarantee retail scheme we weren't as it was not in place then. What is really crappy though is that the NZ govt. did not have to renew the guarantee when they did about 11 months or so before SCF fell over. The writing was on the wall at that juncture BUT the govt CHOSE to prop up the lame dog..shame on them. We lost $80k in the end an large amount for any one eh? It was a hard time especially as a bill for $20 k came thru the door the day after Hanover went to shit!!!! The money was to be freed up in under 10 weeks alas we had to find the money for the double glazing bill elsewhere.

I am bitter about the whole thing as it keeps being dragged up and thus its hard to have closure! We keep hearing more and more shit about what happened and how we were effectively duped out of our cash by double dealing dishonest people. But one has to move on what? Just think what we could have done with $80k. I wish all the very worst luck on Hotchin and Watson. We are lucky in that we could afford to lose that money..so many other investors could not..that is the biggest shame in this whole debacle.

Re: Hanover claim
 

I completely agree. But we are all potentially at the mercy of the unscrupulous, which is where regulation comes in. However, as you've quite rightly alluded to, in NZ, the regulators won't save you since many practices are allowed here which are strictly against the rules elsewhere. For example, allowing these firms to report accrued capitalised interest. This allowed Hotchin and Watson to draw capitalised loans (to the tune of something like $90m!) down to companies controlled by themselves something like 90 days before it all went pop.

I guess my point is that wherever you are, you can only rely on regulation so far: capitalised interest lending is very risky, and Hanover made no secret that they did this stuff. The way they reported accrued capitalised interest was directly equivalent to what Enron did with mark-to-market accounting, yet most of those who got burned by Enron were in the USA.

What has always baffled me about Hanover in particular is that the investors let Hotchin and Watson off the hook three times: (1) when they declined the opportunity to force them into liquidation (2) when they voted for the moritorium and (3) when they voted in favour of the Allied Farmers deal. The Allied Farmers deal was especially difficult to see coming: let's not forget that Rob Alloway got well and truly turned over too, and he's meant to be an expert. But by this stage, it wasn't about being a financials expert, it was about being a judge of character. Hotchin and Watson had by that stage already proved themselves to be thoroughly self-serving and, at best, incompetent, yet the investors kept trusting them again. I guess that's the bit of this I can't work out. There's a definition of insanity that describes it as the repeating of the same actions with the expectation of a different outcome. Repeatedly trusting these two with investor money was never going to end in favour of the investors.

I hope both of them end up doing jail time, but I have a nasty feeling it's going to turn out they haven't broken any New Zealand laws. If there's a lesson to learn, I guess it's never to give these people a second (and certainly not a third) chance.

I hate the fact that investors got taken by these guys, but the World over, this is the nature of the beast. I once read an economics article (can't remember where now) which described the scenario of dviding all the World's wealth evenly between the World's population at 9:00AM. By 5:00PM, it would all be back where it started.

Good luck with the class action - I really hope you get somewhere.

Re: Hanover claim
 

Would you care to expand on that? I understand what mark to market accounting is and also capitalised interest but don't really see how they are connected ?

And wasn't Enron sunk by hiding losses in undisclosed offshore businesses rather than using mark to market accounting which is an accepted (if somewhat of a guess) way of accounting for future derivative contracts.

It amazed me at the time what a outstandingly clever and, at least in Australia, profitable business Enron was. Pity it was run by some unscrupulous d**ks.

Matt

Re: Hanover claim
 

I'll grant you it's rather a long bow, but what I'm driving at is that reporting accrued capitilised interest means you're booking the revenue even though you haven't received the cash. Mark-to-market was used by Enron to book the full value of futures as if they'd settled now. You're quite right of course that mark-to-market accounting is perfectly legitimate in (for example) derivatives trading, but Enron abused this to tell the story Jeff Skilling was trying to tell (sell?).

As I said, a bit of a long bow, but the parallels struck me somewhat.

The full story of how Enron fell is rather a long one, but the book "The Smartest Guys in the Room" is a great read. I'd say a combination questionable practices led to their collapse. As an aside, I was offered a job with Enron in London one Friday. I went home to consider it, and they went bang on the Sunday. :eek: Shame really - it was great money! ;)