City Pacific freezes mortgage fund
The Financial Review reported that City Pacific asked the Australian Securities and Investments Commission for permission to freeze redemptions on its First Mortgage Fund.
"We have been receiving a lot of redemption requests and have given a notice to ASIC where we will defer payment of redemptions for up to 180 days," Phil Sullivan, managing director of the Gold Coast-based property developer and fund manager, told the newspaper.
"With the negative press our ability to meet the redemption requests as well as satisfy our construction draw downs has been difficult. It's unbelievable what's happening to us. We played it clean and straight."
The Financial Review reported that the company said it expected to receive $326 million, presumably in loan repayments for its primary fund, during March.
The newspaper also reported that City Pacific was seeking to sell part of its interest in Martha Cove, an extensive residential development in Melbourne's outer south-eastern bayside suburbs.
The Australian reported that City Pacific has to find $49 million to settle the purchase of Mariners Cove on the Gold Coast in early April (a purchase negotiated back in August 2007).
Commonwealth Bank late yesterday denied the lively speculation that it was moving to enforce security over the assets of City Pacific, such as by appointing receivers. Certainly those trading in, and trashing, the shares of the company yesterday morning were taking a dark view of the financier's prospects.
Shares in City Pacific fell 49 per cent yesterday morning in trading on the ASX to 98 cents. The company requested a trading halt in the middle of the day.
Newspaper reports in News Limited tabloids yesterday and Fairfax broadsheets on Monday highlighted the uncomfortable details of the corrected balance sheet and more expansive notes to the accounts lodged with the ASX late on Friday.
These clarified that the Commonwealth Bank loan of $240 million to City Pacific First Mortgage Fund is repayable by the end of May, with $90 million of that repayable by the end of this month.
One condition of the loan is that net redemptions may not exceed $20 million on any five consecutive business days - presumably an impossible condition to satisfy in the current climate.
City Pacific is also due to pay a dividend of $33 million at the end of April, though this payment may be in question given the company's main managed fund - which is a separate entity - cannot pay redemptions to investors.
The last financial statements for City Pacific First Mortgage Fund, dated June 2007, put the fund's assets at $1.2 billion, though the Financial Review reported the fund's assets were now $900 million.
In a three-page clarification of various funding and strategic issues sent with the corrected financial statements to the ASX on Friday, City Pacific said that it "made steps" to replace the debt of the First Mortgage Fund "with institutional investment"; a negotiation made more urgent and much more difficult by the decision to freeze redemptions.
City Pacific ran into strife with ASIC in mid 2005 over the conduct of its mortgage fund, including a dispute over whether investments were at call. The firm changed the terms of the fund to give it up to 180 days to pay redemptions even though the firm had always paid redemptions within two days.