Hubbard died in 2011, a year after SCF had been put into receivership and then liquidated with a series of asset sales. A funeral for South Canterbury Finance would have been a grim event, with very little to cheer those at the wake. The company had been destroyed in the last seven years of its eighty-four-year life, principally because of Hubbard, his vanity and his unwillingness to cede control. He had surrounded himself with the weak and the easily controlled, rather than giving power to strong and skilled people who could have made the business sustainable. I conclude that the various directors were inept right until the end, inexperienced in finance company governance and ill-prepared to guide the firm through troubled times.

For his longest serving employee, Kevin Gloag, the spectacle of SCF’s journey to its casket was distressing. He worked for ‘Mr Hubbard’ for half his life. He had, as respectfully as he could, spent hours and hours trying to persuade Hubbard to restore his empire. Gloag was Hubbard’s strength. Hubbard’s treasurer and former lender was your archetypal South Island man – a South Island age-group rugby rep, a golfer, a senior cricketer, a deer hunter and one of the few men to have netted half a tonne of whitebait in one day on the West Coast. He knew that the changes Hubbard was sanctioning in December 2009 would end in disaster. He believed that allowing a cabal of the Dunedin ‘Tartan Mafia’ and an American with no knowledge of SCF’s competitive advantage to take control might be inviting in people to select the funeral director and hand out sausage rolls and Speights to the relatives and friends.1

Gloag wanted to see knowledge, drive and a determination to restore the company. He saw none of this. He stayed on with increasing sadness, watching SCF fall to bits, respectful to the new regime but not respecting their strategies. His departure in May 2010 was inevitable.

Hubbard had some excellent assets that would have grown in value over time, but they too were victims of SCF’s demise. At first used to support the company, later they were casually sold off by others to shorten the mourning process after the company’s death. Those who had borrowed money from SCF and gambled that their projects would be completed and sold profitably even in troubled times were often treated disgracefully. They were the victims of the company’s would-be rescuers.

In many cases they lost the equity they had in their projects, were exploited and unrewarded for their time and effort and could not prevent the value of their work being handed on to others. Those victims naturally see injustice in the processes and look for explanations. My own judgment is that the motivations of the rescuers were coloured by a naive desire to believe in the ‘best possible’ outcome for poorly thought-out strategies. It is certain that Trustees Executors, Forsyth Barr, McGrathNicol, Maier and the audit teams Woodnorth Myers and Ernst and Young would not want their future to depend on that experience with SCF.

Most certainly Treasury, the Reserve Bank, the Securities Commission and the Companies Office would not want to be judged solely on their performance with SCF. John Key, Bill English, Simon Power and the National government would clearly wish that SCF’s travails had occurred under someone else’s watch. Key and English in particular were required to make judgment calls that neither seemed to me to have the skills or the commitment to consider intelligently. Their behaviour seemed designed to avoid political damage rather than to optimise the outcome for the taxpayers. SCF director Stuart Nattrass saw clearly that the SCF disaster was the result of Hubbard’s own failures, magnified by the incompetence of others and the public sector’s inability to manage private sector assets.

The downfall of SCF showed multiple failings in the financial system, in the laws that govern it and the people that are supposed to run it. What we need is reform, as I will outline in the last chapters of the book. But before then we have to look at a special group of Hubbard’s victims: the thousands of investors who lost everything and were not protected by the government guarantee scheme. Amid the injustices suffered by so many, this was perhaps the worst.