For a lot of people, the sorry saga of Metropolitan Mortgage & Securities Co. and affiliate Summit Securities Inc., which both shut down here 11 years ago, has faded from memory or holds little relevance in today’s vastly reshaped local financial landscape.

For many investors, though, particularly seniors who endured significant hardships because of the money they lost when those supposedly super-stable companies collapsed, the recollections no doubt are still sharp and painful.

They should feel some sense of closure, though, when the complex and lengthy U.S. Bankruptcy Court-directed effort to recoup as much of their money as possible is deemed to be complete, which now appears, thankfully, to be within sight.

As the Journal reported recently, a Bankruptcy Court judge has approved a second—and likely final—five-year extension of separate trusts that were established to liquidate the companies’ assets, which included widely scattered and diverse real estate holdings.

The extension was based on the likelihood of recovering close to an additional $60 million through remaining property sales, and dedicated plan administrator and trustee Maggie Lyons says she hopes final distributions can be made to investors by 2018—well before the extension expires.

The lion’s share of the additional proceeds are expected to come from the sale of a 367-acre residential subdivision property in Brea, Calif., that former Metropolitan affiliate Old Standard Life Insurance Co. had owned and that has an estimated recovery value of more than $40 million.

To be sure, the amount of money the trusts already have recovered is substantial, but it represents a fraction of the money the investors legally are owed.

To date, the Metropolitan Creditors’ Trust has issued six distributions to trust beneficiaries totaling $101.3 million, which equates to a 28 percent recovery on $361.7 million in allowed Metropolitan bankruptcy claims. Meanwhile, the Summit Creditors’ Trust has issued five distributions totaling $24.2 million and representing a 16 percent recovery on $151 million in allowed Summit bankruptcy claims. The allowed bankruptcy claims don’t include tens of millions of dollars’ worth of preferred stock that also was wiped out.

Many investors had their life savings wiped out or sharply reduced and hundreds of employees lost their jobs when the $2 billion-plus Metropolitan conglomerate, widely regarded for decades here as a safe and conservative investment option, crumbled.

Its demise, which included vacating its 178,000-square-foot, 18-story flagship building at 601 W. First that now is named the Wells Fargo Center, was a local precursor to the financial industry crisis that swept the country a few years later.

Many older investors in the companies have died while waiting for the trusts’ work to be completed, a fact that Lyons has often lamented. For their heirs and for those who are still living, the day is approaching when they’ll be able to put the whole matter—at least symbolically—behind them.