Strategic Finance Ltd is now in the hands of receivers John Fisk and Colin McCloy of PricewaterhouseCoopers who say they are working quickly to maximise funds for investors.
The receivership ends a moratorium the company had been operating.
Strategic Finance has around 13,000 investors with investments of $417 million. In calling in the receivers, trustee Perpetual Trust said it believed receivership was a better than proceeding with proposals the company had received.
"The receivers will be focused on achieving the best outcome for investors, and in particular that it is expected ultimately to provide better returns for investors."
Strategic's loan book had declined in value to $220 million in December 2009 from $477m when the moratorium was approved in December 2008.
The decline in the value of the loan book together with failure to meet the targeted level of investor payments envisaged by the moratorium created a review events under the trust deed. A number of offers from third parties were received by Strategic.
Perpetual Trust believed it provided the board and management team of Strategic Finance with a reasonable amount of time to develop these offers and for it to submit them to Perpetual.
Perpetual Trust will be writing to investors next week and the receivers will be in contact with investors in the next few weeks with contact details, their expectation of the timetable for their work programme and when they will be able to advise their expectation of how much of investors' monies will be realised.
Mr Fisk said the receivers were working as quickly as they could to determine the best option going forward to ensure maximum funds were distributed to investors.
He also believed the receivership would provide greater certainty, including for unsecured creditors owed $5.2m.
Strategic Finance is a specialist property financier whose business was mainly funded by debentures. In August 2008 it withdrew its prospectus and suspended all payments to security holders.
In December 2008 it won approval for a managed wind-down of its loan book as an alternative to receivership. The company made an unaudited loss of $99.8m in the six months to December 31 due to significant provisioning on its property portfolio.
Its loan book value fell below 75 percent of principal owed to debenture holders, depositors and subordinated note holders. This, as well as the failure to make the target payments to investors on January 7, triggered an event review and talks with the trustee.
Strategic had received a total of seven proposals from outside parties, but only two were considered viable options, Radio New Zealand has reported. The New Zealand Herald newspaper has reported that the company was in talks with a single bidder and that receivership was still an option.
Former All Black Jock Hobbs is a director of the company.
