AN OLD LOAN

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 191, 8 May 1924, Page 6

AN OLD LOAN

“CITY IMPROVEMENTS” OF 1879 £25,000 WORTH OF DEBENTURES DRAWN Wellington raised its first “City Improvements” loan away back in 1879. It was a loan of £lOO,OOO raised in London at 6 per cent., with a currency of 50 years, and a sinking fund at the rate of £7OO per annum. These particulars are of interest because of a little gathering which took place in the Mayor’s room yesterday afternoon, which was attended by the Mayor (Mr. H. A. Wright), the town clerk, city solicitor, city treasurer, the corporation’s sinking fund commissioners, and representatives of the banks interested The object of tlio meeting was to draw little white discs, each bearing a number corresponding with a debenture taken up in the mistv year of 1879. up to the amount of £25,000, which sum will be remitted at once to the present holders of such debentures in England. This is not the first instalment of the repayment. The first £25,000 was repaid in 1914. the second in 1919, and the third was the one drawn yesterday, leaving another £25,000 to be paid in 1929—th0 year the loan matures. The rate of interest paid on this loan of 1879 was the highest ever paid probably for the simple reason that the world was much wider then and Wellington a place of comparative insignificance in a new colony-—all factors not conducive to tempt the conservative British investor of mid-1 ictorian times. The only other loans on which such a high rate of interest was paid was the 1880 Wainui Waterworks loan (with a currency of 49 years), of £130,000, and a small loan of £324 17s. raised in April, 1883. in connection with the Pahiatua endowment. Ten years later Wellington was able to borrow a sum of £165.000 in London for drainage and sanitation at 4J per cent, and after that many loans were raised at 4 and 41 per cent. —evidence of the growing confidence of the investor in the future of this city.