Mascot failure likely to cost taxpayers $33 million

• Tweet

The government is set to claw back some $33 million in the first distribution following the failure of Macot Finance, the Timaru-based finance company that is one of two entities to call on the government’s retail deposit guarantee, according to the latest receivers’ update.

Monday, January 18th 2010, 9:22PM

by Paul McBeth

The government, which paid out the 2,511 investors owed $65.2 million under the terms of the deposit guarantee scheme, can expect to receive 50 cents in the dollar in the first distribution payment, according to Paul Munro and Brett Chambers of Deloitte. In their six monthly report dated Sept. 2, they had realised some $23 million from Mascot's loan book, which has a net value of $42.3 million, $36.9 million of which is tied up in property loans.

"The amount likely to be available to secured and other creditors is difficult to assess as the outcome will be dependent on the values from a small number of larger loan balances," the report said.

Still, they are unclear when the first payment will be made, and said "any subsequent distributions will be dependent on the outcome of continuing realisation efforts" and they do not expect unsecured deposit holders, unsecured creditors, redeemable preference shareholders or ordinary shareholders to receive any repayments.

Munro and Chambers said they had received expressions of interest to buy Mascot's personal loans book, which was worth $978,000 as at Sept. 2, but had decided "aggressive servicing of the loans" would result in a better cash flow than accepting a discounted sale. Still, they said they are open to selling the personal loan book when the quality of loans declines.

The Treasury estimated the cost of Mascot and Strata Finance drawing on the guarantee scheme to be $34 million, according to the government's financial statements for the year ended June 30, 2009. In the first update for Strata, receiver William Black of Mcgrath Nicol said he doubted investors would be paid in full. Strata went in receivership owing investors $448,000.

In the five months through November, The Treasury boosted its provisions for the retail deposit guarantee to $899 million. Some 73 institutions are covered by the scheme, with deposits totalling $133.1 billion, of which about $5.5 billion is in the non-bank sector.

Paul is a staff writer for Good Returns based in Wellington.

Comments from our readers

No comments yet

Add your comment:

Your name:
Your email:	Not displayed to the public
Comment:
Comments to Good Returns go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved.

Anti-spam verification:

Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process.