"TOO LATE FOR ME"

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 139, 15 June 1938, Page 13

"TOO LATE FOR ME"

BANK CLERK'S CRASH. DEALS WORTH £5,000,000. NOW OWES £138,080.—ASSETS NIL. (Special.—By Air Mail.) LONDON, May 21. How a. 36-years-old bank clerk, with €300 capital went into the property business and became involved in deals worth £5,000,000 was revealed in the London Bankruptcy Court this week, when Bruce Ylieland Parker admitted liabilities of £138.980, with assets nil. Parker told the Official Receiver that he bought a. block of twenty-nine flats in Chelsea, costing £80,000, and a 2750acre estate in Norfolk, costing £31,000, without any capital behind him. After his examination was closed Bruce Parker left for South Wales to become second mate in a coistal cargo steamer and begin to pay off the £135.9!i0 he owes to eighty creditors on a wage of £3 10/ a week. Before ho left Bruce Parker told how his millionaire ambitions had failed. "I began working for the Bank of England in 1931 when I was 20. I had been to sea. training as a merchant service officer until then. "In 1932 I was still working in the bank and I wanted to get out. So, with £300 savings, I began investing in real estate. My method was easy. I didn't need any money at all. It works like this. You buy a property freehold, paying the deposit on it with borrowings from the solicitors to whom you give the business. Then you sell the freehold, subject to a lease to yourself, and with what you '-an borrow on the lease you have enough cash to complete the original purchase and pay back the solicitors. With the rents of the property you pay interest to the mortgagees on the lease and the ground rent. Then sell the property for a profit. "In 1935 I resigned from the hank with a bonus of £2325 in lieu of a life pension. I had been earning a salary of £550 a year. But my income from rents, on paper, was £15*000 a year. "I've certainly had some narrow shaves from being a millionaire. I was once just about to sell a property in the city, offered to me for £2,300,000, at a profit of £900,000. But the prospective purchaser learned of the profit involved and the deal fell through. "On behalf of a European Power I negotiated with the French Government bo huy the island of Mauritius for £80.000.000. That fell through. My profit would have been about £5,000.000. I was also once empowered to offer £5,000,000 for the Bremen and the huropa, but the German Government stopped the sale. "Altogether there are now about ten properties in London in my name all [laying their way now—too late for me."