Huka Lodge for sale

The Court of Appeal has appointed receivers to sell Taupo¯’s luxury Huka Lodge as part of a longrunning dispute between the lodge’s owner Alex van Heeren and his former business partner Michael Kidd. The pair had been feuding since the mid-1990s after Kidd claimed van Heeren had hidden millions of dollars of assets from him when their partnership ended. After decades of litigation, on April 14, 2015, van Heeren was ordered to pay Kidd US$25 million (NZ$38m) by the High Court in Auckland, within a month of the judgment’s release but he had not seen any of it yet. Van Heeren, a former honorary consul for the Netherlands, tried to stop the appointment of receivers to the shares of Worldwide Leisure, the company which owns Huka Lodge, which has hosted guests including the Queen, Bill Gates and Hollywood stars Michael Douglas and Kate Winslet. He claimed a buyer had already been found. But last week the Court of Appeal appointed McGrath Nicol’s Kare Johnstone and Andrew Grenfell to sell the company’s shares.