Welcome to our new Q&A Friday feature. I expected to be inundated with questions and you did not disappoint me! (more…)

I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “Victims of Vestar” name and would like to ask for your feedback.

The name hasn’t been sitting well with me for some time. This feeling was cystallised recently in an exchange of comments with Graham who talked about “a blog which is (more…)

VoV has been in touch with the Frozen Funds Group, an action group working on behalf of investors in the ING Diversified Yield Fund. Here is what they have to say…

A group of us investors (+ a few advisors) banded together over a year ago to form the Frozen Funds Group. We have been battling with ING/ANZ for compensation and believe that at least partly through our efforts have achieved a (more…)

An article in Saturday’s Herald titled “Recession over the hump and wasn’t so bad after all, Sir Robert says” quotes Bob Jones as saying…

“Naturally the downturn wiped out the developers as downturns always have and always will, and in turn, wiped out thousands of mums’ and dads’ savings through dumb finance company lending to those developers.

“Aside from stupidity, the salient reason for this disaster was the imbalance which arose when finance companies found cash inflows easy and sensible lending options scarce. So they increased their high-risk lending to developers in the absence of other options. It’s an age-old cynical, cyclical pattern which will repeat itself within a decade.”

It’s obvious to us investors now that the reason finance companies found cash inflows so easy was (more…)

The NZ Herald reports today on papers filed in the High Court at New Plymouth. It quotes an elderly woman whose life savings were invested into seven failed finance companies and funds, including ones Vestar was connected with.

This will sound very familiar to Victims of Vestar members, many of whom have identical stories. (more…)