DARING ADVENTURER

Greymouth Evening Star, 24 January 1931, Page 2

DARING ADVENTURER

FRAUDS INVOLVE £317,000. The amazing career of Francis Lorang, the former head of the Blue Bird oil companies, who rose from poverty to great wealth in a few years, has been cut short by his conviction at the Old Bailey, London, on November 25, for fraud. He was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. , Lorang, who is 49 years of age, was one of the most daring financial adventurers of the post-war era. He was indifferent to the sufferings of others so long as he prospered. His schemes have involved many people in ruin and brought death to others. The son of a baker, Lorang went to England from Luxembourg in 1903 and apparently led a more or less precarious existence. He married Amelia Schneider, a girl from Luxembourg. In 1918 he was living with his wife and two sons in a back room of a boardinghouse at West Kensington, and, to say the least of it, his circumstances were very straitened. His finances were low, but his courage—perhaps effrontery is the better word — was high, and he sought to impress everyone with his substantial position. He took a small office in Bucklersbury, London, posed as a financier and company promoter, and launched the British United Trading Company, Limited, a concern which imported goods from Germany and sold them in England.

Lorang’s forceful personality so impressed people that one man put the whole of his little fortune into this company, while the promoter’s contribution, in addition to 20/-, was his “vast experience.” Although his salary as managing director of this company was only £4 a week, Lorang lived up to his theory that to succeed one had to impress people with one’s importance. He gave up his lodgings at Kensington, took a house in Hammersmith, and began to live in much better style. The British United Trading Company did not last long, and Lorang found himself compelled to take a job as a commercial traveller. That, however, was not for long, for he had the Blue Bird companies in mind. How he formed them was told in the course of the trial at the Old Bailey, but what was not disclosed is the misery and tragedy which has been brought into the lives of hundreds of people by his manipulation of these companies. Lorang lived like a man of large fortune, and from his house in Hammersmith he migrated to Surrey where he obtained possession an old country house. Here he maintained a large staff of servants and lived on the grand scale, entertaining lavishly, particularly those people who had money to invest. He was, to use his own phrase, swimming in money. Two brothers who joined Lorang in good faith, one serving on the boards of, and the other investing money in, his companies, were found gassed in their garages after the disclosures of Lorang’s duplicity had been made public. Their father, also a large Blue Bird shareholder, did not recover from the shock of the double tragedy and died a few weeks later. By this time Lorang had fled th'e country. The tragedies occurring in England as the result of his handiwork did not appear to affect him for he frequented night clubs and other gay centres in Paris. REMARKS BY THE JUDGE. The sentence imposed on Lorang was in respect to a charge of fraudulent conversion of £317,000 and with publishing a false statutory report. “On the clearest possible evidence,” said Mr Justice Swift, passing sentence, “the jury have found you guilty of a series of frauds on the companies of which you were managing director and in the management of which I have no doubt that you were the leading spirit.

“Commercial life in this city or in any community,” he said, “could not continue if men like you were to be allowed to do the acts which you have been proved to have done in this case and to go unpunished. You have been the cause of terrible disaster to these companies and to numerous people who were interested in them.” Lorang seemed dazed by the sentence and it was not until a warder touched him on the shoulder that he seemed to realise what had happened. Mr Eustace Fulton, addressing the jury for the Crown, said that it had been proved that Lorang took money from the various companies and paid it into his private account. “I submit,” he said, “that it is quite plain that he took the amount charged against him and a great deal more—his indebtedness according to the accountant was something like £500,000— -and, having used it for his own purposes, sought by a series of fabricated documents to deceive people into thinking that they were properly taken and used for the purposes of the company.” Mr St. John Hutchinson, defending counsel, said that Lorang’s case was that every payment, nay, more, which went into his account from the companies was paid out again for the benefit of the companies with the knowledge and consent of the directors. It had not been proved that Lorang made a penny out of these transactions.