Richard Emery (of Hawaii First, a property management company retained by the Ilikai AOAO to provide financial management services) stated on several occasions that the Ilikai delinquencies are now in excess of $1,490,000, of which circa $1,260,000 are Anekona delinquencies. At a Board meeting at the end of October, I asked Richard Emery whether these figures included legal fees. Mr. Emery explained that indeed, these figures include various fees related to efforts that were supposed to help collect those delinquencies. For ex., Lyle Hosoda was contracted by the AOAO at the end of 2008 specifically to focus on collection of Anekona delinquencies. At the October 2009 meeting, Richard Emery quoted $125K-$135K as the amount of fees to Lyle Hosoda. He also added that those total dollar amounts may include some of the legal fees to Chris Goodwin, the AOAO’s ex legal counsel. When I asked how much of the Anekona delinquencies have been collected so far, the answer was $0.
By the way, how did Lyle Hosoda get here? Lyle Hosoda was recommended by Richard Emery. Some of the current Board Directors, incl. Bob Romo and Lea Sasak, sided with Richard and were heavily pushing for contracting with Lyle Hosoda. Anekona was removed from the Board in February 2009, i.e., almost a year ago. The owners’-controlled Board has been officially in control since early March 2009.
Bundling the dollar amounts for the delinquencies and various fees is not particularly informative and could be misleading. Therefore, I sent a letter to the Board and Richard Emery to request (a) to break down those bundled dollar amounts to show the amount of delinquencies and various fees, and (b) to request a status report on the collection efforts, incl. what the Board has done, is doing, and planning to do to collect, and how much they are envisioning to collect. Here is the letter. I did get a quick reply from Mr. Emery. He wrote that “it is up to the Board to respond,” and that Hawaii First did not get paid extra for efforts to collect delinquencies.
I’d like to add that collecting delinquencies is not as hopeless as some individuals are trying to present. – It depends whom and how you go after.
I would think that a collections agency would love to get 40% of the amount listed above. I have used them and am happy with the result… something is better than nothing right?