High-flying property developer Nigel Anthony McKenna -- the man behind two key companies placed in receivership at a billion-dollar Queenstown resort today -- has soared up the nation's "rich lists".
Ranked 69th on last year's NBR Rich List with $120 million, up from $75m in 2005 and $100 million in 2007, Mr McKenna, 47, has described his smallest project in recent years as being worth $100 million and the biggest one at more than $1 billion.
His biggest business, Melview Development Ltd and its book of $1.5 billion projects, is just part of Mr McKenna's empire covering property development, property and facilities management, hotel management, investment, finance and tourism and employing about 200 people, in addition to contractors on his building sites.
But today two subsidiaries, Melview (Kawarau Falls Station) Development Ltd, and Melview (Kawarau Falls Station) Investments Ltd, were put into receivership.
Mr McKenna has been described as the nation's most influential developer, cruising down Auckland's motorways in his navy Bentley Continental, on outings from his luxury waterfront apartment.
But he told Unlimited magazine two years ago: "I don't actually get up in the morning to make money; it's not something that motivates me. "I'm passionately driven to create buildings that work for the people that live in and around them," he said.
The multi-millionaire was born in London to an Irish builder who moved to Ireland a decade later to run a small building company.
Mr McKenna was 20 when his father died, and he laboured, washed dishes and pumped petrol to support the family before completing a degree in construction economics at Dublin's Trinity University, which enabled him to become a quantity surveyor.
In 1987 Mr McKenna moved to Whitby, near Wellington and continued assembling the knowledge of law, project management, engineering, architecture and management that has been credited with helping him build his empire.
He established his own project management firm, Kenman Consultants, in 1989, which became Promanco Kenman, and eventually managed the Metropolis in Auckland and Wellington's Shed 5 and Dockside developments.
The company was sold in 1996 with a portfolio of $2 billion and 60 staff across New Zealand, Bangkok and Singapore, and the entrepreneur moved to Auckland for projects such as the heritage restoration of the DFS Galleria Customhouse and 40-level Metropolis apartment tower.
By 2005 the NBR rich list estimated that his wealth had jumped from $25 million in 2004 to $75 million through turning large areas of Auckland's CBD fringe into some of the city's most exclusive apartments, notably the Stratis development near the former America's Cup village.
According to Mr McKenna good design equals good business, and he has taken a keen interest in the architecture of developments such as Auckland's Lighter Quay and Beaumont Quarter, the Viaduct Harbour's Sebel Quays, and the Lighter Quay urban renewal project, as well as the Holiday Inn in Wellington.
And in recent years Mr McKeena has thought bigger, with two huge projects: Auckland's $1 billion Flat Bush, planned to house 40,000 people, and Queenstown's $1 billion Kawarau Falls resort with a string of hotels and apartments, in which he last year announced Britain's BlueSky Capital had invested more than $300 million.
Recently he has been working on McArthur Ridge, a $500m world-class five-star hotel with a health spa, and high rise apartments in Atlantic City said to be worth $US350m ($NZ575m).
