BUCKET SHOP FRAUDS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1618, 4 March 1903, Page 37 (Supplement)

BUCKET SHOP FRAUDS.

The rarrest in Belgium .of the two well-known hankers,. Messrs Hutt Brothers and, de Ooomian, has created a sensation in Paris. The Coonian Bank, which ; flourished for three brief years in Belgium ,and France, and came to a sudden, collapse last year, was the biggest bucket shop ever known, even in Paris. The French creditors of the Cooman, Bank number 32,000, mostly poor people, servants and clerks. The

bank’s liabilities in France are. about £2,000,000, and in Belgium perhaps one-half or one-third of this amount. M. Coonian was five years ago a young stockbroker’s clerk, and it was the brothers Hutt who found him the capital necessary for starting a bank. In the space of six months branch establishments sprang up like mushrooms in every Paris district and in more than 100 French ■ and Belgium provincial towns, the local managers being in moist cases, former clerks of the oldestablished French banks, who supplied

their new employers with addresses of investors. The bankers are charged with having. sold shares by false representations —for instance, by quoting them at fancy figures on Stock Exchange lists issued by them. The victims were led to believe that the shares tpurlchaJsied by them were 'continually rising in value, and only when they wanted to sell them did they realise that their scrip was unsaleable. Among these victims are, as usual, a number of priests and superiors of convents. It is said that a Belgian ex-Minister and

at least a dozen members of the Belgian Parliament are implicated. The amount alleged to have been propriated exceeds £6,000,000.