Hotchin says Hanover directors did no wrong

A former owner of the failed Hanover Finance company, Mark Hotchin, says ``no director of Hanover ever did anything knowingly wrong''.
And he claims that reports of his luxury lifestyle after the collapse had been ``incredibly exaggerated''.
''``My personal worth is incredibly low,'' he told TVNZ's Close Up last night. ``My financial position now compared to three years ago is dramatically different.''
The financier -- widely criticised for living it up with a holiday in Hawaii and a birthday party in Fiji while investors lost their savings -- said he was not living in luxury in Queensland.
Currently ``broke'' because his assets were frozen, he told TVNZ: ``I can live on a $1000 a week if I was in my own home.''
But he did not live in New Zealand to reduce the chance of his children being exposed to a lot of ``mixed feeling'' about him.
Mr Hotchin acknowledged in the TVNZ interview that his unfinished $30 million home on Auckland's exclusive Paritai Drive was not a ``vanity project'' but, grew over time ``and ended up somewhat larger than we anticipated''.
The home is owned by a family trust, which Mr Hotchin said he was unable to talk about.
He understood investors were hurt, upset and bitter: ``A lot of people have lost a lot of money,'' he said.
More than 16,000 investors lost more than $500 million they had invested in the company.
Hanover and its associate, United Finance, froze some $554 million of investors' funds in 2008.
Investors agreed to a moratorium proposal but were later asked to swap their fixed income securities to new shares in Allied Farmers.
Allied Farmers drastically wrote down the value of the assets. Hanover and Allied have since criticised each other, alleging mismanagement of the assets.
Mr Hotchin tonight claimed that Allied Farmers , which took on Hanover's debt, had wrecked it and wasted it.
Hanover had been ``a strong company...we believed we would get through''.
After it ran into trouble, said he and co-founder Eric Watson had agreed to put in $76 million for shareholders and ``that happened''.
The televised interview coincided with a hearing in which a High Court judge is due to hand down a judgement on whether Mr Hotchin's assets, worth millions of dollars, should remain frozen. Media were banned earlier this week from reporting details of the court hearing, other than the judgement.
An order, granted to the Securities Commission in December, froze Mr Hotchin's assets and gave him $1000 a week to live on.
Mr Hotchin also unsuccessfully sought permission to take a $200,000 Mercedes Benz car and a $90,000 Porsche Cayenne car to Australia, but Justice Helen Winkelmann rejected that application at a High Court hearing in December.
At the end of today's interview, journalist Mark Sainsbury read out feedback from some readers who suggested the appearance was a public relations stunt and Mr Hotchin's remorse wasn't genuine.
Mr Hotchin said he was sorry.
``I felt sorry right the way through,'' he said. ``This was never the plan.''