Canada's ABCP group grilled over fix-it proposal

By Lynne Olver

TORONTO, March 31 (Reuters) - The first of five sessions meant to inform retail investors about a fix-it plan for Canada's C$32 billion ($31.1 billion) asset backed commercial paper market only served to confuse many of them, participants said.

"I didn't understand 80 percent of what was said here," said investor Walter Kushnir at Monday's meeting. "Why is that? I'll tell you why. The process was not fair, and the result was not fair."

Retail investors were not represented on a committee that hammered out a proposal to restructure the market, and none of the players on the committee will suffer personal losses as a result of the freeze-up of the ABCP market, Kushnir told Toronto lawyer Purdy Crawford. Crawford led the restructuring committee over seven months.

"People like me are completely confused, we're confounded," Kushnir said. "We stand to lose an awful lot on a personal level. Our families stand to lose an awful lot."

Dozens of people took to the microphones at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to detail how their funds became trapped in what they had assumed to be safe investments until the nonbank ABCP market seized up last August due to wider credit-market jitters.

Crawford said several times that he sympathized with retail investors, and he acknowledged that the proposed restructuring is not perfect.

"A perfect plan would get 100 percent of everybody's money back today, that is not in the cards," Crawford said at the two-hour meeting.

All investors involved, no matter how much money they have at stake, get to vote on the restructuring proposal on April 25. But the retail investors, who collectively have C$350 million or so tied up, far outnumber the big institutional investors, and have the power to scuttle the deal.