Suggested losses of $60 million to $70 million in the Blue Chip property group liquidation may be only "a drop in the bucket'' of investors' total losses, financial consultant Murray Weatherston
said yesterday.
He was commenting ahead of meetings investors in collapsed Blue Chip-related companies held in Auckland yesterday with liquidators.
The first meetings, at 10am, were for investors who own apartments but lost the guaranteed income they were supposed to get from their Blue Chip investment product.
The second session, at 2.30pm, was for those who invested through another eight companies. Many of them lost deposits on apartments yet to be completed.
"Many people who have actually had properties settled to them will be facing big losses on the values of them,'' he told Radio New Zealand yesterday.
"I personally think the loss of value there will actually swamp whatever the numbers are in the liquidation.''
He was "a bit doubtful'' about how successful claims for recompense would be.
"It may be things that you and I might consider to be unethical or immoral have occurred, but there's a big difference often between what seems to be unethical and what seems to be illegal.''
Mr Weatherston also raised the possibility that some creditors would want to see new liquidators appointed, as they were unhappy that Blue Chip shareholders had appointed the firm Meltzer Mason Heath now doing the job.
Meanwhile, Jeff Meltzer, liquidator for 20 Blue Chip-related companies, said there was a question mark over what had happened to the deposits of investors in developments that did not go ahead.
Some were being completed by different developers unconnected to Blue Chip, who had sold to other investors.
The original deposits were not held in trust, The New Zealand Herald reported yesterday.
"So there is a question as to [the] ability to trace any ownership and double sales,'' Mr Meltzer said.
"Is it a double sale, or is it a sale from two different developments? And what we have to do as liquidators is look at the legal position of it. There's a huge amount of emotion around, and I can fully understand it and I sympathise. But we have to look at what is the true legal position. And it's a bit grey at the moment.''
Creditors' meetings for investors in Invercargill and Christchurch are to be held on April 8.
