Kerryn Downey and William Black, of McGrathNicol, the Receivers for South Canterbury Finance Limited (SCF), are very pleased to announce today that SCF’s shareholding of 33.6% in DHL has been acquired by existing NZ shareholders.

US shareholders, holding 25% of the shares in DHL, followed a parallel process and also sold their shares to the existing NZ shareholders.

The transaction values the DHL Group in excess of $535 million, enterprise value. SCF will receive $56.4 million from the sale of its 33.6% interest.

The Dairy Holdings Group is the largest corporate owner of dairy farms in New Zealand. The group owns 58 dairy farms and owns and leases a further 15 grazing blocks, all in the South Island, covering a total land area of 18,000 hectares. In the 2010/11 season, the DHL Group produced 14.1 million kg of milk solids from approximately 43,400 milking cows.
Kerryn Downey said, “This has been a lengthy and robust sale process that commenced in December 2010. We have worked closely with other shareholders and our sale advisors and are delighted that the sale has been to NZ buyers and will not require OIO approval. This is a good result for SCF, the Crown and the Trustee.”

The Receivers of SCF were advised by First NZ Capital, working with Murray & Company acting for the US-based shareholders.

 ends

For further information regarding the SCF Group, please refer to the website (www.scf.co.nz) and the Receivers’ website (www.mcgrathnicol.com).

Media Enquiries:
This release issued on behalf of McGrathNicol by:
Kate Alexander
Alexander Communications
Tel:    +64 9 524 4957
Mob:  +64 27 244 6094
kate@alexandercomms.co.nz

About McGrathNicol
McGrathNicol is an independent advisory firm specialising in corporate advisory, forensic, transaction services and corporate recovery. It is a market leader in Australia and New Zealand, with more than 300 people across the region, including more than 31 partners.
Note to media
Kerryn Downey and William Black, of advisory firm McGrathNicol, were appointed Receivers and Managers of South Canterbury Finance Limited and its charging subsidiaries on 31 August 2010.
Charging Group Entities (collectively “the SCF Group”)
South Canterbury Finance Limited (In Receivership)
Belfast Park Limited (In Receivership) 
Braebrook Properties Limited (In Receivership) 
Face Finance Limited (In Receivership)
Fairfield Finance Limited (In Receivership) 
Flexi Lease Limited (In Receivership) 
Galway Park Limited (In Receivership)
Helicopter Nominees Limited (In Receivership)
Hornchurch Limited (In Receivership)
Rental Cars Limited (In Receivership)
SCFG Systems Limited (In Receivership)
Sophia Investments Limited (In Receivership)
Southbury Insurance Limited (In Receivership) 
Tyrone Estates Limited (In Receivership)

Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich

”I don’t feel so good,” Lula said. “It was that last doughnut. There was something wrong with it. It was one of them cream-filled, and I think they used old cream.”

”You ate ten!”

”Yeah, and none of the others bothered me. I’m telling you, it was that last doughnut. I’d feel better if I could burp.”

A typical exchange in Explosive Eighteen between Janet Evanovich’s stalwart bounty hunter Stephanie Plum and her loyal offsider, zaftig ex-prostitute Lula involves junk food. Lula nabs her prey with an aplomb that matches her appetite, and breaks for reviving fried-chicken lunches several times a day. (Shortly after the above conversation, the two women use the scent of a fresh pizza to apprehend an FTA (failure to appear) – but not before Lula packs away several slices: “I thought it might settle my stomach, but I was wrong.”)

The funny thing about the Plum series, now 18 books deep, is that while there’s nothing new under the Jersey sun, the set-pieces are so sharply written, the dialogue so snappy and the supporting cast so deliciously batty that the lure is as irresistible as that pizza.

Stephanie is a Jersey-fied, loosely mob-linked, grown-up Trixie Belden. She works at Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, the business owned by her erstwhile cousin, who has so much trouble staying on the right side of the law long enough to get any straight work done that Stephanie basically runs the show.

The plots of the Plum books are beside the point, and in Explosive Eighteen Evanovich has barely bothered. Between skits involving the captures of FTAs and bone-crunching takedowns of anonymous bad guys, she makes a stab at a putative storyline: on a flight from Miami to New Jersey, Stephanie is seated next to a man who, by mistake, puts an unmarked surveillance photograph of an unidentified man in her carry-on bag. On discovering it at home, she traces it back to her aircraft companion . . . who has since been found murdered and stuffed in an airport rubbish bin. The photograph is of value and is sought by many, but Stephanie has already disposed of it.

You’ll forget how the matter is resolved even as you’re reading. What constant readers will relish are Stephanie’s encounters with longtime paramours Ranger and Morelli (both of whom feature in the sojourn to Miami), and the family-dinner interludes, which are hilariously discomforting to all but her elderly grandmother:

”You need Annie to help you,” Grandma said. “She’s real smart. She’s fixing everyone up at bowling. She even had a man in mind for me, but I told her he was too old. I don’t want some flabby, wrinkled codger to take care of. I want a young stud with a nice firm behind.”

My mother refilled her wineglass and my father put his fork down and hit his head on the table. BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG.

“Go for it,” I said to Grandma.

“I’m not so old,” Grandma said. “There’s parts of me don’t sit as high as they used to, but I’ve got some miles left.”

My father pantomimed stabbing himself in the eye with his fork.

There’s no shortage of pace left in her granddaughter either. Evanovich is on a good wicket, and with the first movie adaptation of a Plum novel, One for the Money, coming soon with Katherine Heigl in the lead role, the series is likely to remain high-octane for a while yet.

2.5 / 5 stars: Frivolity that stays on just the right side of profane.

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The Real Katie Lavender by Erica James

If Erica James has carved out a niche for herself in the cluttered world of light romance fiction, it is one in which vile weather never descends, there is no such thing as a traffic jam, and the laundry is done by little elves who come in the night. Reading one of her books is like escaping into such a world – the intellectual equivalent of sinking into a warm bath clutching a glass of wine after a very long day.

In this sense, there is little to distinguish her latest, The Real Katie Lavender, from 2010’s The Queen of New Beginnings or the 13 novels that preceded them. Where James flexes her imagination most is in the set-up: Katie Lavender is a 30-year-old woman who in the opening pages is sacked unceremoniously from her job in media production. She takes this on the chin, largely because she knows real loss. Three years ago, her father died abruptly from septicaemia caused by food poisoning (who knew to be afraid of that?), and it is one year since the death of her mother.

Katie, an only child, was close to her parents and is bereft – but this being the type of story it is, James steers delicately away from an analysis of grief and towards Katie’s irreverent best friends Tess and Zac and, most usefully, towards a letter from a lawyer’s office summoning her for a meeting.

Perplexed, she arrives to be informed of the truth about her parentage. She is not her father’s biological daughter but the product of a brief affair during her parents’ marriage. Her father forgave her mother and raised Katie as his own. Her natural father is apparently a man both of conscience and some standing, for he has endowed her, she now learns, with a trust fund worth more than £750,000.

Her curiosity piqued, she goes in search of Stirling Nightingale, and in the most ludicrous of a series of implausible positionings – this is where the wine comes in handy – stages her first meeting with him by posing as a waitress at the 90th birthday celebration for his mother, Cecily. There she also encounters his two grown children with Gina, his wife of 34 years, and meets her obnoxious, egotistical half-brother (Rosco, 32), and her pregnant, self-absorbed, 29-year-old half-sister Scarlet.

On the same occasion, Stirling receives a visit from the police with the news that his brother and business partner Neil has been found dead. The suicide was prompted, it transpires, by events including the embezzlement of money from the firm’s clients and an extramarital affair. Neil’s wife Pen, a gifted gardener with a sweet exterior and a core of steel, is blindsided.

The stage is set for romantic trials and family travails . . . but wait, where’s the love interest? That would be Lloyd, Neil and Pen’s son. (If you’ve deduced that this makes him Katie’s first cousin, you’d be right – but you can be sure Ms James has a solution.)

The Real Katie Lavender is the brightest and most undemanding of chick lit. There are idyllic settings – Pen’s glorious gardens, the majestic Nightingale family home, Lloyd’s cosy love nest – and a clutch of themes that are sufficiently stimulating in the moment to hold attention but not so unsavoury as to be unpleasant reading (infidelity and other garden-variety secrets and lies, troublesome relationships with in-laws). There is nothing to offend a sensitive reader or to please those with exacting literary standards – but the rest of us are comfortably served.

2 / 5 stars: Safe, supremely unchallenging chick-lit.

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The Quest for Anna Klein by Thomas H Cook

I knew of Chekhov, but was unfamiliar with his hammer until I read a passage in Thomas H Cook’s spellbinding historical novel-cum-spy thriller, The Quest for Anna Klein. The implement is mentioned during a late-night conversation in the hushed gloom of the patrician Century Club in New York City shortly after the fall of the Twin Towers. There, a bright young graduate student sits metaphorically at the knee of a mysterious octogenarian, who has summoned him to hear his life story.

The ostensible purpose of the meeting is for Paul Crane to draw information from the former anti-Nazi agent that might help the US government with its inchoate war on terror, but as Thomas Jefferson Danforth’s story unfolds, Crane hears a tale not of expert warfare but of mid-century European horrors, triple-crosses, dummy cyanide caplets and deathless obsession.

And Chekhov’s hammer? It refers, Danforth tells Crane, to the Russian writer’s musing “that at the door of every happy person, there should be someone tapping with a little hammer, just as a reminder, soft but steady, that there are unhappy people in the world.” It’s an arresting notion, and the text is laced with such cultural gems: the aborted plan for a monstrous Palace of the Soviets; the story of would-be Hitler assassin Maurice Bavaud; the sentimental US secretary of war who spared Kyoto from nuclear attack.

The model seen in The Quest for Anna Klein – a simple storyline overlaid with intersecting subplots and rich with fascinating factoids – is the same as that perfected by Dan Brown, which is no backhand compliment. It’s a clever way to produce an historical thriller that leaps between the early 2000s and Europe during World War II, the latter among the most trampled ground in all of modern fiction. It adds scope and grandeur, makes the characters more worldly and the reader feel smarter, and permits no flag in pace, even as Danforth languishes in prison for nearly 20 years (though Cook spares us any Solzhenitsyn-esque rumination).

Danforth meets and falls in love with the object of his affection during World War II, when he joins a small team of conspirators who plot to kill Hitler and sabotage the German war effort. Their exploits are recounted through Danforth’s reminiscences with Crane, and the seamlessness with which Cook darts between the two creates a lively, kinetic energy that never succumbs to the mustiness of refracted memory.

If the point is the titular activity, in the end Danforth’s quest is more metaphorical than literal. Anna is elusive, almost non-corporeal, and impossible for Danforth to grasp or possess. Even the most fundamental aspects of her identity remain in question years after her wartime activity. She is likened specifically to Joan of Arc, while Danforth perceives in her “a fatalism she had long ago accepted, making her seem like a woman walking toward her future just as religious martyrs walked towards their execution sites”.

As they plot the murder of Hitler, an undertaking which includes an astonishing scene of Fuhrer attending a viewing of his paintings with Danforth and Anna, it emerges that none of the many who in real life attempted the same lived to tell about it. Those who weren’t slain in their tracks inevitably perished in prison.

Cook captures the audacity and danger of this enterprise, and of the ensuing banality of being sentenced to life without such exotic invigoration, with precision. The Quest for Anna Klein justifies the effort of pursuit.

2.5 / 5 stars: An historical novel with an edge.

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The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks

Many famed genre novelists start getting itchy in mid-career, wanting to break new ground and exercise different creative muscles. John Grisham took a right turn into non-fiction, Patricia Cornwell developed a project on Jack the Ripper, and Nicholas Sparks, now comfortable with the royalties from his books and their multiplying film adaptations, could likewise do whatever took his fancy.

In The Best of Me, his 16th novel, he has chosen instead to return to familiar ground. Present and correct are the attractive people in mid-life discontented in their present circumstances (see: Nights in Rodanthe), who were passionately in love a lifetime ago but separated by the devilish machinations of older, cooler heads (shades of The Notebook, where the reunion happened after a few years, rather than more than two decades later as in The Best of Me).

Other plot points have similarly been Sparksified before, though won’t be revealed here: but if you’re familiar with any of his earlier storylines, you are unlikely to be surprised by anything that transpires in The Best of Me.

The male protagonist is Dawson Cole, a strong silent type made for the silver screen, who spent four years in prison for vehicular manslaughter in his North Carolina hometown. Now he lives an hermetic, ascetic life in Louisiana, working on offshore oil rigs and sending regular anonymous payments to the widow of his victim. Never married, he harbours an unquenchable love for . . .

. . . his feminine counterpart, Amanda Collier, who when the pair met and fell in love as teenagers had the misfortune of coming from the right side of the tracks, which meant she had parents both attentive and self-important enough to intervene. Her youthful obedience has resulted in stay-at-home motherhood, an unhappy marriage to an alcoholic dentist, and, following the death of her young daughter, volunteer work at a child cancer hospital.

Amanda and Dawson are at last reunited in their early 40s in their hometown by the death of a local personality, Tuck Hostetler, who fostered their early love. Sparks’ descriptions of Tuck’s various noble machinations to bring the two back together are at once mawkish, endearing and implausible. Shallow stylings are characteristic of Sparks’ writing: when Dawson first encounters Amanda in a high school class, he observes that “her eyes [are] the colour of warm summer skies” and that the “mischievous hint” about her smile suggests “she knew something that no one else did.”

The more I read, one word repeatedly sprang to mind: lazy. When Sparks isn’t resurrecting plot points and themes already canvassed extensively in his other work rather than taking the more demanding, time-consuming route of allowing characters’ actions to reveal their motives, he’s falling back on Dan Brown-esque interior exclamations (‘Do you know what you’ve done?’ asks a voice in Amanda’s head. “’Yes, but I love him’, another voice answered.”).

As always, there is plenty of sweetness in his storyline, so it’s hard to feel too curmudgeonly about the repetitiveness, but the Manichaean approach he takes to the writing of his characters, who are permitted only to be saints or sinners, grows tiresome. The ending is nothing short of preposterous – but it will make for a hell of a tearjerker on screen.

0.5 / 5 stars: Dire. Approach with extreme caution.

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The liquidator for the Blue Chip group of companies, Meltzer Mason Heath, has filed a $40 million claim against the failed property investment group, which banked investors’ funds straight into its own bank accounts instead of into trust accounts.

The statement of claim, lodged in the High Court in Auckland, is against Blue Chip’s former directors and auditors, and on behalf of about 800 investors, says Jeff Meltzer of Meltzer Mason Heath.

Todays announcement featured in a number of key national news outlets including The New Zealand Herald, TVNZ,  Sharechat, National Business Review, Stuff, Interest.co.nz and a number of other news outlets across the country

 Taylor believes the three most likely factors to be compromised within project management are time, quality or cost.

The article explores how project managers can manage compromise, strategies and tactics to use and how to weigh up the cost of implementation.

The full article can be read here.

Controversy, “cool factor” and great pizza have been key ingredients in the development of the highly successful company who have now successfully entered  Asia – opening stores in Seoul, Korea after already making a significant impact on the New Zealand market.

The International development of the brand has been steady with franchises in India, Ireland and Australia.

The Dominion Post, Nelson Mail and the Manawatu Standard  recently ran a page dominant article on HELL Pizza, talking with the founder Stu McMullin. You can read the online version here of the Dominion Post version.