Class versus crass

What’s the difference between Timaru and Auckland?
Now before all the latte-drinking, Auckland socialites haughtily scoff at the ridiculousness of such a comparison between the Queen City (with its supposed superiority) and the provincial heartland town – I’d ask them to consider the difference between how troubled Timaru-based financier Allan Hubbard and his Auckland counterpart Mark Hotchin are trying to help their out-of-pocket investors!
In this case the difference is crystal clear – it’s the heartland versus the heartless! It is substance over style, man over maggot. It’s about one man owning the problem and facing up to it – compared to the other who refuses to be accountable and runs away.
But it looks like I am not the only person questioning the difference between the approach, ethics and treatment of investors of Messrs Hubbard and Hotchin. It looks as though many in the media and those both inside and outside the financial community are contrasting the approach that the Hanover Finance co-founders Mark Hotchin and Eric Watson have taken to their company's problems compared with the old-school approach by South Canterbury Finance founder Allan Hubbard.
While the 82-year-old Hubbard - who has dialysis treatment for his kidney problems three times a week - is still working hard to try to rescue his company for the longer term. A personally conservative man who has no time for Auckland flash, Hubbard wants to do the best by his investors and creditors and has tipped a considerable amount of his $600 million personal fortune back into the business.
Meanwhile, mainstays of the social pages and darlings around Auckland’s awful and shallow celebrity circuit Mark Hotchin and Eric Watson have shown just how greedy and crass they are compared to the class and honesty of Hubbard. Watson did a bunk to Europe ages ago, while Hotchin is currently hunkering down for the winter in Hawaii.
"We don't have to justify where we get our money or what it's spent on, to anyone," was the arrogant brush-off Hotchin’s wife Amanda gave when a Sunday Star-Times reporter asked how they were funding their stay in a $43,000-a-month hideaway.
The Hawaii jaunt is just the latest in a long list of an ostentatious lifestyle that Hotchin and Co have rubbed in the face of the 16,000 former Hanover Finance investors - who are still waiting to get a return on their investments.
There's also the $30 million mansion on Auckland's Paritai Drive that has now been left unfinished; the planned $13.8m holiday home on Waiheke Island, Hotchin’s 50th birthday party at Fiji's exclusive Vomo Island at a time when the company was in strife, and wife Amanda appearing in the best dressed competition at Melbourne Cup Day last year.
So it's not surprising that people are less than impressed by the attitude of these brash Aucklanders have displayed compared to the dignified and diligent approach of the Timaru-based Octogenarian.
Here’s another difference.
Newstalk ZB host Mike Hosking – a living, breathing example of Auckland’s faux lifestyle and look-at-me culture – has jumped to the Hotchins' defence, claiming the media pursuit of the businessman was simply evidence of the "tall poppy syndrome".
While Radio Live’s Marcus Lush – a former Aucklander – who turned his back on that city’s fake lifestyle a decade ago, and is now based in the most heartland of locations – Bluff – has not been backward in coming forward about how the Hotchins have behaved so appallingly to their out-of-pocket investors.
As they say – enough said!