PAA gets 'yes' vote, takes next step to wind-up

PAA members have voted to establish the association's Holiday Home Legacy Trust.

Monday, June 11th 2018, 6:00AM

The move is one of the steps required to allow the association to be wound up, clearing the way for Financial Advice NZ.

The fund will administer the $2 million proceeds of the sale of the association's holiday homes.

At a special general meeting in Auckland on Friday, members voted 98 to two in favour of the trust.

PAA chief executive Rod Severn said he was was delighted with the outcome.

"The committee formed to oversee the creation of the trust deed, Andrew Kerr, Peter Leitch, Trevor Slater and Bruce Cortesi put in a lot of time and effort into getting this trust deed right. The legacy trust has an excellent board of directors with a deep understanding of what the legacy means, strong governance credentials, and a willingness to ensure the money is used to reflect the purposes of the Trust. I want to thank the PAA members for their strong support," he said.

"The PAA board now needs to approve the transfer of funds into the trust and commence the wind-up process of the PAA. This should take between two to three months."

A previous SGM had voted against an earlier version of the trust deed.

Member Geoff Wilson said he was the only member who raised concerns about the deed before the vote was taken.

He said issues discussed were that the deed required no reporting of results or activities to anyone and the appointments panel was not required to to call for expressions of interest from anybody, before compiling a list of potential trustees for election to the board.

"The danger of this approach is that there is no transparency anywhere, and no one other than the board will know anything. And if anything contentious arises, they will deliberately avoid reporting anything. The same people argued that in spite of that, there was no danger of the trustees becoming a secret society," Wilson said.

"I challenged the moral right of those that had not contributed to the capital of the holiday homes scheme to exercise their vote. They had not contributed to the capital of the fund, unlike the group that I represented, who had all done so by owning credits in the holiday home scheme. As the non-holiday home scheme members and their proxies heavily outnumbered those who had created the capital and held the credits, the deed was passed without any changes."

Tags: PAA PAA Holiday Homes