South Canterbury Finance has recovered $202 million of outstanding loans during the first four and a-half months of the year as it seeks to shore-up cashflows during the year.
Chief executive Sandy Maier said "excellent progress" had been made in recovering outstanding loans and about 10% of South Canterbury's total assets had been cashed up since the beginning of the year.
"Since beginning work on the impaired asset portfolio, the asset recovery team has examined every loan in detail and developed a recovery plan for each," he said in a statement.
As South Canterbury looks to restructure and recapitalise itself, it has split into three divisions; "good bank" to eventually hold secure loans of $1 billion, a "bad bank" holding $500 million of impaired loans, mainly on property investments, and "private equity investments", holding up to $400 million in associated companies.
Among the impaired loans was Dunedin's former chief post office hotel development.
After developer McEwan Group failed, South Canterbury was left holding a debt and penalty payments totalling $7.5 million.
The building sold last week to southern hotelier Geoffrey Thomson for an undisclosed sum.
"Ensuring sufficient liquidity for the business is our major challenge and focus and is one of the key metrics for management," Mr Maier said.
He said specialised asset recovery made a "very useful contribution to the overall cash position", furthering debt repayment and investment in fresh lending.
"A significant proportion of the recoveries have been achieved by the specialist asset management team working to realise assets in the company's portfolio of non-core and non-performing loans," he said.
Total loans recovered included advances to farms, property developments, vineyards and to corporate entities, he said.
