New Zealand’s Overseas Investment Office (OIO) has approvedthe sale of New Zealand’s troubled East Coast-based vegetable processor CedencoFoods to Imanaka Ltd, a Japanese importer and exporter of food, housing andchemical products.
Imanaka – a major customer of Cedenco – needed approval toacquire the factory's 10.94ha of land in Gisborne and intends to continuerunning the business, the OIO said. It did not release the price paid.
Despite being one of New Zealand's biggest fruit andvegetable processors, Cedenco was put into receivership by ANZ National Banklast November, after it defaulted on NZ$46m owed to the bank and NZ$4.7m tounsecured creditors, the New Zealand Press Association said.
The company's Australian affiliates SK Foods Australia,Cedenco JV Australia and SS Farms Australia were also placed in receivership atthe time, reportedly owing the New Zealand arm of the business NZ$11m.
The American arm of SK Foods became the subject of a majorcontroversy after its former chief executive Frederick Scott Salyer, wasarrested in the US in February on racketeering and corruption charges relatedto a scheme to quash competition for his tomato processing firm and sell SKFoods' tomato products at inflated prices.
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