Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

- Will Rogers

You've reached the web home of the Flat Rock Forests Unitholder Organisation.  If you're unacquainted with who (or why) we are, please consider reading the intro (the next page after this one) which sums up our history and mission.  (Briefly: together we've invested millions of dollars in a forestry trust - some of us even invested at the direction of the NZ government to qualify ourselves to immigrate; however, our funds - millions of dollars - evaporated leaving us nothing.)  The intro page discusses mostly how the trust got started and the first anomalies I spotted when I began to investigate things.  The page following that (How and Why We Came to Immigrate, to Invest in a Forestry Trust, and to Start, Then Liquidate, a Business) discusses our personal involvement with the trust as an investment.  From there, I discuss the difficulties of due diligence, list the forests, tell you what I know about each, tell you what I know about what happened to those forests, a bit about forests in general, all the news articles about the trust and its collapse I could find, and a little about what's happened since and what might happen in the future.  (Unfortunately, there's more of interest but a blanket suppression order currently won't allow me to tell it to you.)

If you want some detail about what seems to have happened (there are 1,150 or so unitholders in all), we have detail.  Find all this information on the forest-related pages (the Table of Contents page for this section - which is also reachable by clicking on the "Up" button below).

The archive of news articles about our Trust and its unusual and untimely death also contains a few peripheral articles about us, immigration, forestry, and the Serious Fraud Office.  (If you're aware of an interesting article about Flat Rock Forests Trust that we don't have, please send us a copy.)

Thus far, we succeeded in having the High Court appoint an independent Inspector (the first since the Unit Trust Act was enacted in 1960) who looked into things.  What happens now remains to be determined.

We once had a message board where people left messages and comments to be read by the general public.  It was a decent forum for unitholders and anybody else who happened by.  However, when we switched hosts, our new host didn't support that format.  Not only did I lose all the old messages, but we had to move to a different format - which I disliked.  After many months, only a handful of people left messages on the new board.  Then, the membership list got loaded up with references to sex sites.  In desperation, I deleted the whole thing.  Sorry...

If you see anything wrong with these pages, think of something we should add, or just want to comment or ask a question, please contact us!  (Feedback is important.)  Those communications are private (although I may ask you if I can post what you say if other unitholders would benefit from reading it).

For news articles on the Flat Rock Forests Trust, forestry, the Serious Fraud Office, one immigrant family's experiences, immigration specialists, fraud, juries, logging, and more, check out the News Table of Contents.  Or you may wish to visit the Forestry Trust Table of Contents to read how a unit trust went bust.  Or the Topics Table of Contents which offers a different approach to lots of topics - among them poisonous insects, eating dogs, what's addictive, training vs teaching, tornados, unusual flying machines, humour, wearable computers, IQ tests, health, Y chromosomes, share options, New Jersey's positive side, oddities, ageing, burial alternatives, capital punishment, affairs, poverty, McCarthyism, the most beautiful city in the world, neverending work and more...