MADAME HANAU

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 February 1929, Page 9

MADAME HANAU

STARTED AS A PEDLER. t —— From hundreds of small towns and villages in all parts of France are rising the despairing cries of thousands of small investors, who had been induced to part with their hard-earned savings on the extravagant promises of the agents of what is described as the greatest money swindle of modern times. The brains behind this scheme, we are told, are chiefly Mme. Marthe Hatfau and her divorced husband, Lazare Bloch, who are now under arrest charged with embezzling at least £1,000,000. According to some Paris correspondents of the British Press, Madame Hanau is a dominating personality, fond of gaiety and night life, but with an amazing faculty for serious business when it is to be done. The Paris correspondent of the London “Daily Mail’’ reports that her men victims say she is 35 years of age and good-looking, but her women victims, who are in a grea.t majority, declare she is at least 45 and ugly. Actually, it seems, she is 42, and this informant continues :

“Just as in the Panama and Humbert scandals, which shook the political foundations of France, prominent deputies and senators are reported to have been concerned in Madame Hanau’s financial operations. On the board of the ‘Gazette du Franc et des Nations,’ the financial newspaper connected with the five companies she controlled, weie prominent Radical leaders, including Pierre Audibert, formerly principal political secretary to Senator de Monzie, ex-Minister of Finance, and Rene Gast, who is a relative of General Boulanger. “Certain Radical newspapers farmed out their financial page to Madame Hanau. She is said to have been paid more than £3OOO a year for this.

“Madame Hanau and her ex-hus-band started almost as pedlers. When they married in 1908 they were living in reduced circumstances. It was not until 1920 that ,though divorced, they began their financial operations. “In her financial newspaper she recommended to an ever-growing public the various financial enterprises over which she exercised supreme contrql. The speculations, it was prophesied, might bring in dividends as much as 40 per cent to the holders of shares. “Clients deposited gilt-edged securities with her, and it is stated that the majority of these have vanished. Madame Hanau seemed unmoved by her arrest, and sent out at mid-day for a substantial luncheon, which she shared with her ex-husband. She readily answered all the questions of the judicial authorities, and smiled amiably to the photographers who awaited her when she left. The allegation is made that a certain amount of the original funds with which Madame Hanau launched her enterprises was derived from foreign sources. It is commonly reported that Soviet gold formed the basis of operations, and even that a certain amount of the profits went back to Soviet Russia.’’

When taken to the police station, we read in a Paris dispatch to the London “Daily News,” Madame Hanau deftly suggested that “masculine hostility to a woman, trespassing for the first time in France on ground hitherto restricted to man’s activities, accounted for the campaign which bankers and heads of stockbroker concerns had carried on against her.” «We read further that: “It is the character and career of this enigmatical woman rather than the alleged vast sums involved, or the possible political complications, which mainly interest the Paris public todav.

“The circumstance that she retained her divorced husbmand as her business partner is accounted for by Madame Hanau as evidence of the distinction she has habitually drawn between the home and the office. Mi’ Bloch (she has explained to her friends) ‘failed her as a husband, but as a business man she never had grounds for doubting his fidelity.’ Hence the severance of one partnership and the continuance of the other.

“The social and political power which, particularly in France, the possession of great wealth imparts, is what Madame Hanau wanted, her friends asserted to-day. They declare that a ‘v/igue and misty pacifism’ which coloured her political activities revealed a genuine emotion, and was not, as the police suggest, merely a cloak for her financial schemes. “Her career is rich in contrast. During the war, hovering in the rear of the Allied armies, she retailed to tired soldiers a mixed drink of rum and milk, while in the years following the Armistice she rapidly became a notable figure in subterranean finance in France.

“Her dominating personality made her more than a match for the male financiers with whom she clashed during her hectic career. It was as a journalistic ‘saviour’ of the French currency that Madame Hanau in 1925 first came under public notice. The newspaper to champion the 1 tench franc, which she started modestly in one room, soon blossomed out into the ‘Gazette du Franc,’ for which the most eminent politicians in France and ■abroad were ready to write.

“From journalism her activities extended to finance, and in two years she started a group of ‘banks’ and financial concerns with high-sounding titles, and with ramifications throughout France. It is asserted that she controlled 400 stock and share agencies in France, and that thousands of canvassers under her supervision were daily engaged in soliciting for her financial schemes the savings of frugal peasants and shopIn the Paris “Intransigeant” L. Bailby recalls that about a year ago some sharks, through a twist on the Stock Exchange, were able to make a fortune in 24 hours, but he reminds us that the victims of Madame Hanau were “modest civil servants, retired tradesmen, landlords who were only receiving the same rent as before the war, professors and magistrates who tried, poor devils, to add to their wy-Stched budgets, which have been eaten up by the high cost of living.