Opus Capital Group chief executive Dean Palmer has said the group has made solid progress in improving the way it operates and pledged to reduce the Opus 21 fund’s debt.
Palmer’s comments follow Century Funds Management’s failure to gain control of the property trust.
“We have a term sheet with Suncorp that extends the debt position for Opus 21 out to 30 September 2012,” he said.
“We have an underwriting agreement to inject another $2.5 million of capital into Opus Capital Limited as the manager and that will address the future ASIC reforms that ASIC have currently got on the table.”
“We have already acquired a new responsible entity so that we can actually go through a process to put a new best practice corporate governance model in place to separate the board of directors of the manager from the responsible entity.”
He said sale fees had also been reduced and Opus Capital had a strategy to reduce the Opus 21’s loan-to-valuation ratio to about 50 per cent over the next 12 to 18 months and refinance the loan with another lender.
Importantly, the Opus Capital board was refreshed on 31 January with the appointment of a new chairman and four new directors, he said.
“We can confirm that the new Opus board will appoint an independent external investigator to examine all related-party transactions and let the cards fall where they may,” Palmer said.
Prior to the unit holders meeting on 28 February, Century said Opus had engaged in a number of related-party dealings.
“Opus lent $17.3 million from Opus 21 to Opus G1, another Opus fund, without your consent and has now advised that Opus 21 has already lost 90 per cent of this investment and a loss of the whole $17.3 million seems likely – a loss to Opus 21 investors of 8.1 cents per unit,” Century chairman John McBain said on 15 February.
“Opus 21 bought two properties, which were leased to Tretecnic, a company related to two Opus directors, without obtaining independent valuations.”
“Tretecnic went into liquidation resulting in a $17.8 million loss for Opus 21 investors – a loss to investors of an additional 8.4 cents per unit.”
Century planned to waive $1.3 million worth of management fees, raise money to reduce the fund’s loan with Suncorp, reduce management fees and administration costs and also investigate the related-party dealings if it had become the replacement manager of the $240 million fund.
However, the fact Century lost showed unit holders supported Opus, Palmer said.
“We see that as a complete rejection of Century’s proposal to take over the fund,” he said.
“I did note that in some of the releases that Century have made since the vote that they are indicating that they got 80 per cent of the vote and therefore most people wanted a change and it just didn’t quite get across the line, whereas we see that in a completely different light.”
“Our campaign that we run was to either vote no or to throw it in the bin. So a lot of our supporters actually didn’t vote at all.”
