ROYAL COMMISSION ON SHIPPING RINGS.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 167, 15 July 1907, Page 2

ROYAL COMMISSION ON SHIPPING RINGS.

Giving evidence before the Royal Commission on Shipping Rings this week, Mr. G. E. Wright, secretary of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, spoke of the constant complaints received during •the past few years by his Chamber ironi merchants and manuiacturers with reference to the manner in which their trade was being affected by the operation of shipping rings. In most cases it had been impossible to obtain details even on the promise of the strictest privacy. That reserve on the part of traders could only be put down to the fear that the communication of details might conceivably lead to their being traced by shipowners in consequence. In 1903 the chamber received complaints as to a serious preference from Antwerp and Hamburg to New Zealand with transhipment at London, and a firm of merchants in New Zealand reported that they were receiving goods by the Tyser line at lower rates than that at which they could get them from London. The rate from London direct was 37/6, and the rate from Antwerp and Hamburg, via London, •was only 22/6. The question was taken np with the Tyser line, and they r«piied that their object in nxing lower rates from Continental ports was to take it out of the power of Continental steamship companies to run a. service from the Continent direct to New Zealand, and. this could only be done by competing with the Germans, which they were doing at considerable cost to the New Zealand steamship lines. They stated further that a. -few yeaxs previously their rates from ■London were considerably lower than from the Continent, but that at that time British manufacturers evidently did not see the necessity lor holding their trade, whereupon the Germans entered into keen competition, and so built up a large trade, which compelled the New Zealand steamship lines to reduce their rates to the Jaw level they had then reached. The company did not say whether it was the German, manufacturers or the German snipping lines who ■were building up a large trade with. New Zealand, but the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce could find little or no evidence of either.