Earlier this week, the partially-completed development in Orewa of 750 apartments/homes was placed in the hands of receivers, followed shortly after by the separate and unrelated receivership of the $250 million Whisper Cove development, in the same district.
Companies Office records show Kensington Park Properties Ltd is in receivership and reveal that of the 61.4 million shares registered, the largest parcel of 17.5 million, or 28.5%, is held by Titmotu Orewa Investment Ltd.
Titmotu was incorporated in February 2006 and is registered with Mr Cummings, of Mosgiel, as its sole director.
All its 1000 shares are held by Park Lane Trustees Ltd, a separate company of which Mr Cummmings and Scott Mason, of Dunedin, are the sole directors.
Mr Cummings owns all 100 Park Lane shares.
When contacted yesterday, Mr Cummings said there was an obvious downturn in the property market but he had been overseas for more than two months and as a "passive investor" had left all details of the Kensington Park project to developer Patrick Fontein.
Mr Cummings has extensive southern business interests, being a director of 60 registered companies operating in Otago and Southand, whose activities include property, construction, e-commerce, finance-related concerns and the automotive industry, the latter including sales, servicing and rentals.
"This [Kensington] investment is ring-fenced and, consequently, any loss will have no effect on my other business or affairs whatsoever," Mr Cummings said yesterday.
He said Titmotu was a private investment company related only to himself, as opposed to having a large number of other investors involved.
The BNZ loaned $41 million for Kensington Park and Westpac had a first mortgage over the separate Whisper Cove, but how much money the banks could extract from the doomed ventures was now up to KordaMentha, the receivers, trying to rescue both projects, The New Zealand Herald reported.
Mr Fontein, developer of Kensington Park, blamed his project's demise on plummeting property values and bank repayment demands as the global credit crunch spread, explaining in a letter to investors how diving real estate valuations spelled disaster for the entire property development sector, the newspaper reported.
Mr Fontein said he would lose the Kensington Group of companies he had built up during the past 14 years.
