  The census of the Solar neighbourhood is still incomplete, as demonstrated by
recent discoveries of many objects within 5-10 pc from the Sun. The area around
the mid-plane and bulge of the Milky Way presents the most difficulties in
searches for such nearby objects, and is therefore deficient in the known
population. This is largely due to high stellar densities encountered.
Spectroscopic, photometric and kinematic characterization of these objects
allows better understand the local mass function, the binary fraction, and
provides new interesting targets for more detailed studies. We report the
spectroscopic follow-up and characterisation of 12 bright high PM objects,
identified from the VISTA Variables in Via Lactea survey (VVV). We used the
1.9-m telescope of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) for
low-resolution optical spectroscopy and spectral classification, and the
MPG/ESP 2.2m telescope Fiber-fed Extended Range Optical Spectrograph (FEROS)
high-resolution optical spectroscopy to obtain the radial and space velocities
for three of them. Six of our objects have co-moving companions. We derived
optical spectral types and photometric distances, and classified all of them as
K and M dwarfs within 27-264 pc of the Sun. Finally, we found that one of the
sources, VVV J141421.23-602326.1 (a co-moving companion of VVV
J141420.55-602337.1), appears to be a rare massive white dwarf that maybe close
to the ZZ Ceti instability strip. Many of the objects in our list are
interesting targets for exoplanet searches.
