Perpetual sends St Laurence to the receivers, slaps down Podmore

Perpetual head of corporate trust Matthew Lancaster said "the letter to investors that St Laurence released yesterday was without the required authorisation of the trustee" and that Podmore had been "expressly" told that it should not be sent.

"There were a number of reasons for this, principally that the information contained in it was selective, and potentially misleading as a result," Lancaster said in a statement. "Under the debt for equity swap which relocated investors into a new company, the existing management would have remained in place and in that and other respects, St Laurence's proposal provided no certainty that the very disappointing performance of the company in the recent past would improve."

St Laurence gave investors an ultimatum, saying it was on the brink of insolvency and that they could choose to either swap their debentures for shares in a shell company that would own the assets, or send the company to the receivers.

Perpetual's Lancaster was scathing of the offer to investors, saying the company had not been open in the manner in which it acted, and that it was not able to provide the McGrath Nicol report it had commissioned, nor any report from Grant Samuel, despite the public references.