Bettaway nightmare continues

There should be a house on Nooroa and Tangi Samuel’s property in Ngatangiia. Instead, goats graze on grass that is growing as rapidly as interest on a bank loan.
The Samuels are currently mired in a nightmare of banking misadventures, lawyer bills and liquidation procedures dating back to late 2008.
That was when the ANZ bank sent more than $70,000 to Bettaway Buildings Limited, a company located in the Henderson suburb of Auckland. The money was payment for a kitset home the Samuels had planned to have constructed on that land in Ngatangiia – received as a wedding present from Tangi’s family – as an investment property.
Nooroa claims the bank released the loan money without proper authorization. That alleged mistake was compounded in May 2009 when Bettaway went into liquidation, sucking the Samuels’ money and house – and future – into a vortex of debt.
To add injury to insult, ANZ is demanding the loan be repaid, and is piling on the interest with each passing day. That interest has inflated the original $90,000 loan to $124,000, and counting.
A phalanx of local lawyers has advised the Samuels they appear to have two choices: pay the loan off or surrender the land to the bank for the next 60 years. Even then, depending on the value of the property, they could still owe money on the loan.
“(The lawyers) have pretty much said they can’t help us,” said Nooroa. “We have to pay the money.”
“I’m not willing to pay for empty land,” said Tangi. “I want my house.”
She said the family’s dream of eventually passing the property on to their children has now become a nightmare of bills.
“I’m not happy,” she said. “People shouldn’t be treated that way.”
The Samuels have a daughter living in Henderson who has been to the Bettaway property and claims the company appears to still be in business. Nooroa is planning a trip to New Zealand to deal the company’s director, Clive Doyle.
The last time he saw Doyle, he was pointing at a container outside the Bettaway office and assuring Nooroa that it contained the bits and pieces of his new house.
“He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s coming over’,” said Nooroa. “We are still waiting.”
Nooroa, who provides security at Club Raro, said he has no plans to confront Doyle directly. Instead, he is going to the New Zealand media with his story, hoping a programme such as Close Up can help put the pressure on Bettaway to cough up either a refund or a kitset house.
“I’ll talk to Doyle later,” Nooroa said. “I just want my house, so we can start our life again.”
In the meantime, he is pretty much ignoring the land in question because it hurts too much to even look at it.
“I can’t be bothered,” he said of any effort to tidy the property. “We put the goats on it to clean it up.”

By John Ireland

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