Debenture holders serve statutory demand on Peter Kwee's Laguna

Singapore

TWO pioneer members of the Laguna National Golf and Country Club have made a statutory demand on the club, each asking to be paid S$120,000 for their 30-year-old debentures that are overdue for redemption.

Lim How Teck and Lee Lian Hong, who are both part of a committee building the noteholders' case against the club, served the notice on Wednesday (Mar 2) via their lawyers from WongPartnership.

According to the letter seen by The Business Times, the club has 3 weeks to pay up, failing which a winding-up application or a winding-up order could be made against it.

Lim had said in January that aggrieved noteholders would take action via a class-action suit at the end of the month.

This intention still stands, he told BT on Thursday. He added that there are now over 200 noteholders who are interested in representative action.

The hope is that this first salvo, in the form of a statutory demand, will pave the way for noteholders to appoint a liquidator to inspect Laguna National's books over the last 20 years, he said.

At the heart of this dispute are tens of millions of dollars that have not yet been paid back to debenture holders, even though the 30-year-old notes were due for redemption in June last year.

These unredeemed notes amounted to S$70.6 million, going by Laguna National's 2020 financial statements.

On the day before the notes were to be redeemed, the club's owner Peter Kwee had written to the trustees, stating that the club was unable to fulfil the redemption "due (to its) current financial position".

Some noteholders are disgruntled, noting that while Kwee said Laguna National had no money to redeem the debentures, he had enough to revamp the golf course and even built a 200-room hotel, Dusit Thani Laguna, on the club grounds.

The tycoon had bought Laguna National from its founding owners in 2001. In 2016, he transferred Laguna National's land lease to Laguna Hotel Holdings, another of his companies.

The current land lease expires in 2040.