PRINCES' TRUST.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 126, 31 May 1910, Page 2

PRINCES' TRUST.

COLOSSAL SCHEMES OF THE KAISER'S FRIEND. Much excitement has been caused in j the financial world by the latest operations of the great multimillionaire "Princes' Trust," which is proceeding along tho lines made famous by the American "money kings" to establish the most colossal "communities of interest" in the history of German finance, writes the Berlin correspondent of the London Daily Mail. The Trust is composed of Prince Max Egon zu Fuerstenberg,. the Austro-German magnate, and the Kaiser's most intimate friend, and Prince Christian Kraft yon Hohenlohe, a distant kinsman of the Kaiser. Prince Fuerstenberg was one of Mr. Roosevelt's hosts in Vienna. Including the Deutsche Bank, which is heavily interested in the Trust, the capital represented in the "combine" aggregates £50,000,000. The Trust is adding to its holdings ab a rate which will some day make it an all-powerful factor in German industry and finance. Its latest transaction is the wresting of the control of the Berlin General Omnibus Company from the Bleichroeder banking interests. _ Control of the omnibus lines places their owners in a good position in respect to the acquisition of all other traffic facilities in Berlin — the tramways and the underground and elevated railways — and these are understood to be the next object of attack by the " X J rinces' Trust." The combination came into existence in 1908. Among the properties it already controls are the, Levant ant} Union Steam Ship lines of Hamburg, the German Palestine Bank, the Nieder-Lausitz brown coal mines, which are gradually acquiring a monopoly of the German "briquette" industry, the great new Esplanade hotels in Berlin and Hamburg, the enormous "Passage" departmentstores and Neves Schauspielhaus theatre and restaurant in Berlin, the Berlin Building and Land Company, with vat-t holdings of improved and * unimproved [ property in and adjacent to the capital, the Bos wan and Knauer Contracting Corporation, the most important builders in Germany, and the great sanatorium and hotel establishment in the Island of Madeira. Besides these properties, which belong to the Trust in it*, corporate capacity, Prince Fuerstenberg and Prince Hohenloha possess personal estates in AustriaHungary and Germany worth millions of pounds. They include tens of thoubands of acres of land, breweries, coal, iron, and zinc mines, and real estate in Berlin, Vienna, and otter cities. The financial Press suggests that the* •expansion of the Princes' "feudal capital" idea is taking place on a scale that requires the shrewdest management, lest eueh a gigantic concentration of wealth becomes a peril to the German financial and industrial fabric.