Donal Curtin faces second court case
By VoV | Vestar Legal Action | Wednesday 10th March 2010New Plymouth firm Dennis King Law served seven sets of proceedings last week and applied to have all proceedings heard in the High Court.
The firm is the second to take action on behalf of family trusts against former directors of Vestar and members of its investment committee, including Donal Curtin, Kelvin Syms and Simon Purvis.
Barrister Lawrence Herzog represents investors in the first case and has a significant head start on the New Plymouth case, having served proceedings early last year.
Under Herzog’s High Court action an initial conference to set procedural guidelines and timetable orders took place on 29 July 2009. A second judicial conference was held on 2 December to address progress of the claim and defences.
In response to the latest case, the Commerce Commission yesterday issued the following announcement…
The Commerce Commission has been advised that court proceedings have been filed against Commissioner Donal Curtin, relating to his private role as an investment adviser.
These are further to proceedings filed in the Auckland High Court last year on similar matters, and are issued by private parties.
Until all of the proceedings are resolved, Mr Curtin has been allocated to tasks that do not involve him in decision-making related to enforcement actions under either the Fair Trading Act or Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act. Other steps are being taken to ensure that conflicts of interest will not arise.
The legal actions relate to Mr Curtin’s former role as a consultant to Vestar Financial Services.
There will be no further comment at this time.
Donal Curtin has refused to comment on the proceedings. We do know, however, that last year he told the Commission inquiry that as chairman of Vestar’s investment committee he was responsible for making recommendations on asset allocation but not individual investments, for example particular shares or finance companies. In regard to the latter he was merely one vote and if the company wanted to push a particular share or finance company through, it could easily muster enough in-house votes to do so.
This could be true or it could be clever obfuscation.
VoV would like to know (a) how Mr Curtin actually voted, and (b) why he didn’t resign if he was uncomfortable with the decisions being taken.
Given that he didn’t resign do we take it that he had no qualms about the decisions being taken under his watch?
Tags: Commerce Commission, Donal Curtin, Kelvin Syms, Lawrence Herzog, Simon Purvis, Vestar
Wednesday 10th March 2010 at 9:31 am
We lost iver $150,000 with Northplan/Vestar out of $357,000. We were to be conservative investors yet without our approval money was put into often hopeless investments. $60,000 was put into the new company as a 30 days loan but goodbye to the money. Northplan never told us of MFS – we heard after it became Vestar, not before,
I would like to know how the company owners were paid for the sale by cash or shares. If cash then a lot of that would have come from these latter ‘investments’
Wednesday 10th March 2010 at 6:49 pm
The activities of Trustees of Finance companies have received very little examination. These bodies were supposedly to safeguard investors interests, otherwise they had little right to the fees they drew.
ASB currently use the Public Trust as their Kiwi Saver trustee. Mr Curtin is on the board of Public Trust.