Receiver confirms Waipa mill sell-off

By PAM GRAHAM

The Waipa sawmill near Rotorua, which employs 200 people, will be sold separately from the forests that surround it.

Central North Island Forest Partnership (CNIFP) receiver Michael Stiassny yesterday confirmed speculation that a formal sale process for the mill was being put together.

Fletcher Challenge Forests chief executive Terry McFadgen said his company would almost certainly bid for Waipa.

Fletcher Forests runs Waipa as part of a contract to manage CNIFP's assets, though that contract is separately under review.

Fletcher Forests and Chinese investment company Citic jointly owned the assets before they were put into receivership and the pair failed to convince Fletcher Forests' shareholders to support a plan to buy them back this year.

After that failure, Fletcher Forests is focusing on processing and says it will slowly sell its forests.

The mill is expected to fetch more than $10 million, though there is little public information about its value.

New independent sawmillers are privately scathing about Waipa, which was one of the early large-scale attempts to process logs.

The mill's future has been uncertain for years because of its changing ownership.

The view of one local worker was that Waipa would be a successful business in the future because it was large and well-located.

"They are already there, they are already zoned, they have consents and they have kept pace with Machinery," he said. The mill has reasonable labour relations, he added.

A spokeswoman from the union was unavailable yesterday.

The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union has been fighting for care for workers affected by pentachlorophenol, used to treat timber at mills in the central North Island and elsewhere.