KEY POINTS:
Investors in the Guardian Trust Mortgage Fund have voted overwhelmingly in favour of winding up the $249 million fund but not all were happy with the company's explanations.
Around 120 people turned out to vote in person at the Ellerslie Convention Centre in Auckland yesterday.
Guardian suspended withdrawals
from the fund in July last year, stopping around 3700 investors from taking their money out.
Guardian Trust managing director Greg Campbell said the support to wind-up the trust had been very positive and only one person at the meeting had objected to the closure of the fund.
Campbell said the vote would allow a change in the trust deed to begin to make partial repayments to investors.
He hoped to make the first payment of around 10c in the dollar within eight weeks.
Campbell said the company would then write to investors at least once a quarter to let them know when further payments would be made.
It was now a matter of turning the mortgages back into cash.
"I expect we will have quite a good run at the start and then it will get harder. What we don't want to do is get into a hurried situation. We want to take longer and get the capital back."
The company has estimated it will take two to three years to wind-up the fund.
Media were excluded from the meeting but investors spoken to afterwards had mixed views of its success.
Auckland investors Janice and Ron Kiernander, who have $20,000 in the fund, said they thought the meeting had been well run. Kiernander said the outcome was inevitable. "There were really no options."
He said he felt sorry for an investor who had been sitting next to him who had $600,000 tied up in the trust.
But William Cairns, an investor and former mortgage manager for Guardian Trust, said he was disappointed by the meeting. "They didn't tell us the level of arrears. It was very unusual not to tell us.
"They are just treating investors like idiots."
He said investors were told the information could not be released because it was commercially sensitive.
But he said banks had to tell the market as did finance companies how much they were in arrears.
"They never told us the reason why the fund got into all this trouble. They should have given us a chronology."
He said he would be writing to the board to complain.
A headline in yesterday's Business Herald incorrectly indicated that investors were to vote on the future of Guardian Trust. That vote related only to the Guardian Trust Mortgage Fund.