FINAL DIVIDEND

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 2, 28 September 1937, Page 12

FINAL DIVIDEND

N.Z. Guarantee Corporation, Ltd. RATE UNCHANGED At a meeting of the directors of the New Zealand Guarantee Corporation, Limited, yesterday morning, it was resolved that the annual meeting of the company would be held in Wellington at noon on Tuesday, October 26, and that it be a recommendation to shareholders that a final dividend of 2d. per share be paid. The transfer books will close at 5 p.m, on October 1. An interim dividend of lid. per. share was paid on Starch 24, so that the total distribution for the year ended August 31, 1937, will be 3jd. per share, equivalent to 9 13-18 per cent., the same as for the preceding year. FINANCE CORPORATION OF N.Z. Last Year’s Results A net profit Of £l2Bl is shown in the balance-sheet of the Finance Corporation of New- Zealand, Ltd., Hamilton, for the year ended May 31, against £2218 a year ago. The profit earned was £2174 with respect to ordinary business of the corporation, while the Strathmore account showed a loss of £892. Referring to the Strathmore Estate, the directors state that the company was farming only a small portion of the area, and that further development work was still being carried on in connection with the remainder. For this reason it was impossible to show a profit in the account. With the work that had been done, a considerable increase in revenue for the current year was expected. The directors recommend the paying of the preference dividend for 1934, which will absorb £6BB, and with the £362 brought into the accounts, there will be £852 to be carried forward after providing £lO2 for income tax. The general improvement in conditions has enabled clients either to repay or reduce their accounts, and this. fact, coupled with the lack of suitable investments, has had the effect of reducing the company’s income from its loan accounts. The John account stood at £25,863, compared with £38,708 at the commencement of the year. The bad debts reserve stood at £3796, after writing off further amounts totalling £l3B, BANKING IN NEW ZEALAND Government Interference The annual address of the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand at the meeting held at Wellington on June 11 leaves behind it two main impressions, says the “Economist.” One is the strength of the bank itself, and the second is the growing interference of the New Zealand Government in matters which hitherto have been of banking and commercial concern. The first example of this is the Act by which the Government has taken complete control over the export of dairy products. Mr. Donnelly, the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand, admitted that the Act should prove beneficial to producers in protecting them from severe fluctuations of the market, but he equally had to point out that the New Zealand trading banks had been deprived of part of their business, and he instanced the reductions shown in the bank’s latest balance-sheet in London funds and bills receivable in London and in transit.

Mr. Donnelly also referred to the new Mortgagore aud .Lessees Rehabilitation Act, designed to relieve farmers and others from liabilities which by reason of reduced values and altered conditions, had become unduly onerous. Comparatively few of the bank’s customers had applied for adjustment of their obligations to the bank, and a uumber of voluntary settlements had been arranged with customers. Mr. Donnelly was much more severe on the arbitrary method by which the New Zealand banks were assessed for income tax. A committee was recently set up by the Cabinet to consider the question of taxation, and the banks submitted their case for relief. Oil Company’s Troubles Foreign capitalists are becoming habituated—though not reconciled—to hard treatment from the Mexican authorities, says the “Economist.” The bondholders have gone unsatisfied for years. And the Mexican Eagle Oil Company has been haras’sed by a series of demands for excess taxation, expropriation .of leases, aUd strikes. But the latest, official intervention anticipates lhe, arrival of the economic millennium in Mexico. lhe Board of Arbitration, set up to examine the claims of labour, finds that the profits; of Mexican Eagle from 1964 to U3b averaged 79 million pesos per annum, a figure denied by the company, which states that in alone—the best oi the three years —profits amounted to only lb million pesos. On their assumptions, however, the board proceed to recons mend a forty-hour five-day week (with pay for fifty-six hours) ; free life l^ aur ' ance and pensions up to 85 per cent, or retiring wages; paid holidays up to oO days annually; 80 per cent, of during non-vocatiuual illness; anti finally —an award which reaches the heights ol the preposterous —full pay strike, without limit of period. It is not remarkable, therefore, that Mexican Eagle shares have fallen to. 15/-, and Canadian Eagle (sympathetically rather than logically) to the same level.