Equitable payout complicated and slow

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A verified register of Equitable Mortgages due to get their money back under the government guarantee will go to Treasury within “a week or two, tops,” says receiver Grant Graham of KordaMentha.

Tuesday, March 8th 2011, 7:10AM 1 Comment

by Jenny Ruth

Graham says the timing his appointment, together with colleague Brendon Gibson, just before Christmas "wasn't ideal" in terms of the speed of the process of getting money back to investors.

They were appointed on December 17 after the first receivers from Deloitte, appointed on November 29, discovered they may have had a conflict of interest.

Graham says the fact some Equitable investors were covered by the guarantee but others weren't was a complicating factor.

Equitable had about 6,000 depositors with $192.3 million invested in debt securities and about $178 million are covered by the guarantee.

The lion's share of responses from investors confirming their positions are now back, Graham says.

It is taking much longer for Equitable's investors to get their money back than, say, those of South Canterbury Finance, some of whom received their refunds less than a month after it going into receivership and the rest were repaid within two months.

Treasury spokesman Angus Barclay says one reason for that is that the South Canterbury investors were covered by the previous guarantee scheme which had different rules.

"What appears from the outside to be a simple process of gathering a few names, addresses and dollar numbers is actually quite a complicated and technical exercise," Barclay says.

As soon as Treasury receives the register from the receivers it will be mailing out claim forms to investors, he says.

Last month in an update to investors, the receivers said Equitable had $188.4 million in loans to be recovered but it isn't possible yet to estimate the likely level of recovery, Equitable also had a "significant" amount of cash.

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