It seems that investors' unwillingness to reinvest in finance companies in New Zealand is in itself causing collapses and it seems there's an awful lot of jumping at shadows going on too.In particular, there were rumours swirling around last week about Hanover Finance with comparisons to Bridgecorp being drawn.There are a lot of similarities, but there are significant differences too, not least that Hanover has a "BB+" rating from international credit ratings agency Fitch. That's one notch lower than investment grade.While most finance companies don't have a rating of any kind, Bridgecorp's New Zealand subsidiary was rated by the relatively obscure Australia-based Property Investment Research which admitted in its last report in February that it hadn't bothered to read the parent company's financial statements.Among the similarities are the colourful reputations of each company's founders. Bridgecorp's Rod Petricevic was a former partner of Michael Fay and David Richwhite who in 1985 founded Euro National which posted a NZ$225 million loss in 1988, the year he resigned from the board and sold out.Hanover's principals are Eric Watson and Mark Hotchin, brother of John, one of the two founders of VTL Group and its Nathans Finance which collapsed recently, but who otherwise has a relatively low profile.Not so Watson who ran into a spot of bother in the 1990s with corporate watchdogs in both New Zealand and the US over the takeover of business supplies company McCollam and suspected insider trading. As well as controlling former listed company Pacific Retail Group, his career has included buying the Warriors rugby league team, marrying and then divorcing model Nicky Watson and getting into a punch-up with actor Russell Crowe.Hanover has obviously recognised and worked to mitigate that reputational issue by recruiting people such as Pumpkin Patch chairman and former managing director of The Warehouse Greg Muir as its chairman in late 2005 and former Goldman Sachs executive Sam Stubbs as its chief executive in May this year.Then there's the issue of related party dealings. Arguably, these had a lot to do with Bridgecorp's demise. Hanover, and in its previous guise as Elders Finance, has often been taken to task because of its related party dealings and there are still a fair few of them.Stubbs said that related party transactions totalled NZ$124 million at June 30 this year. That's up from NZ$92.2 million at December 31 and NZ$73.9 million at June 30 last year.Hanover's total loan book was NZ$748 million at June 30, down 12 per cent from a year earlier, while total liabilities were NZ$850 million down seven per cent.The bulk of the related party loans are to property developer and investor Hanover Property but a fair chunk, NZ$29.5 million at June 30 this year, is passed through to one of Hanover's Australian companies to be on-lent as consumer finance, part of the group's diversification strategy, Stubbs said.Rumours that Hanover Finance has lent money to Hotchin and Watson are "completely ridiculous. Not a dollar. That stopped a long time ago," Stubbs said. Certainly, the accounts