Allan Hubbard: Rags to riches and back

South Canterbury Finance driving force Allan Hubbard has seldom given interviews about his life, but during a private encounter one evening two years ago, after meeting Prime Minister John Key at his Timaru offices, he opened up about his early years.

It was, he explained, a hand-to-mouth upbringing in which the family lived on bread and dripping and one main meal a day.

• SCF fate 'of its own doing'

Mr Hubbard told this reporter, his humiliation still vivid, of the character-defining day when the milkman came to deliver two pints of milk, for which his mother had no money to pay.

He left having given one pint and saying he would put the cost "on the slate".

"I vowed then I would never be poor," Mr Hubbard recalled.

It was a promise he was to keep.

At one stage, he was considered the South Island's richest man, with a fortune estimated by the National Business Review in 2008 to be $650 million.

All that has been wiped out with the receivership of South Canterbury Finance.

Those close to Mr Hubbard and his wife, Margaret, known as Jean, say yesterday's events would have shaken the couple, who built their reputation and fortune on helping others, and keeping to their word.

Uncharacteristically for a man who intentionally flew under the radar, he yesterday delivered a broadside at SCF directors and the Government over the receivership.

"It has been deeply frustrating and hurtful, over the last nine months, to have been sidelined by my fellow SCF directors, and subsequently straitjacketed by the Government regulators, from working to save South Canterbury [Finance]," he told The New Zealand Herald.

He and his wife had poured an estimated $400 million of their own cash and equity into the ailing finance company, and he said yesterday it was a body blow when the Government took control of SCF in June.

"Surely they realised that by freezing me out and taking over control of my affairs that they would be dealing a body blow to South Canterbury Finance."

He said yesterday was a big day for the regulators and a sad day for investors.

"Instead, they bring down the boom, take me out, freeze my access to my personal funds, and now so many families, small businesses, farms and enterprises ... are going to be seriously suffering," he said.

Mr Hubbard said some people might consider his management style old-fashioned, but he had never defrauded a single investor of a single cent.

Mr Hubbard grew up as one of five children in a three-roomed home in Forth St, Dunedin, in the 1930s.

The Depression had forced his plumber father to find work planting pine trees at Waipori, leaving his wife at home to bring up the children.