RSS Feed
April 8th, 2013 
Peter Nolan
Updated
More than 200,000 hectares of timber plantations established by the collapsed Tasmanian company Gunns are being put on the market.
Gunns’ liquidator has abandoned a plan to sell the trees as a single entity, leaving the future of its proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill and millions of dollars worth of investor funds up in the air.
Investors, known as growers, are being warned they should not expect to see the kind of returns they were promised when they bought into the timber investments.
“I believe most growers will be relieved,” plantation investor Tom Ellison said.
“It certainly makes it a finite process rather than a sale of the schemes on an ongoing basis that could have dragged out for years.”
Liquidator PPB Advisory had previously said it was in talks with parties interested in taking over management of the multi-million dollar investment schemes.
It is believed Macquarie Group and the company WA Blue Glum were among them.
Now the liquidator has told investors it has walked away from those talks and a court-approved sale process is in the best interests of growers.
“I don’t think that any grower should be particularly optimistic about the return they’ll get on their investment,” Mr Ellison said.
“Certainly some schemes will sell for more than other. Some of the assets were higher quality than others.”
About 130 land owners, including many Tasmanian farmers, leased their properties for the plantations.
They stopped receiving rent when Gunns entered administration last year and have previously claimed the trees now belong to them.
It remains to be seen whether they will try to block the sale or stop buyers from coming on to their land to harvest the plantations.
Gunns’ receiver KordaMentha had said it wanted certainty about the future of the plantations before putting the shelved $2b pulp mill project on the market.
Even if it is still possible to use the plantation timber to supply the mill, questions remain about whether the project is still viable.
“What you would need for the Gunns pulp mill to take off would be certainty,” forestry analyst Robert Eastment said.
“Under the current government at the moment I think the state would acknowledge that there’s no certainty at all.”
The liquidator expects to make the application to sell the plantations in the Victorian Supreme Court in the coming weeks.
Topics:
forestry,
business-economics-and-finance,
hobart-7000,
launceston-7250
First posted
Source Article from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-08/liquidators-sell-gunns27-trees/4616946
Views: 0
Posted in 
