AFTER PROFITEERS

New Zealand Times, Volume XLVII, Issue 10898, 12 May 1921, Page 6

AFTER PROFITEERS

EXIT TO PRICES INVESTIGATION TRIBUNALS. A NEW ARRANGEMENT. The Prices Investigation Tribunals are to go out of existence at the end of this month, and an impression prevails among business people that with the discontinuance of the tribunals will end also the work the tribunals have been doing. ” Tbib, according to an official source -of "'information, will not be the case. It was explained to a “New Zealand Times” reporter that the work will be taken up at tho ‘beginning of June and carried on from then by the permanent officers of the department. There will be really no break in- the work, as the departmental officers will take it up .where and when the tribunals leave it. Some traders are understood to be labouring under the delusion that with the disappearance of the tribunals there will be no further administration of the section of the Board of Trade Act in respect of which the tribunals worked. ’Elis section was generally known as the ‘ ‘profiteering section,” and was aimed at unreasonably high prices. ‘‘The trading public,” said a gentleman closely connected with the matter to a “New Zealand Times” reporter yesterday, “must not think that because tho tribunals are going out they can put up prices._ There will be no more chance of doing that in the near future than there was in the recent past. The officers of the department in whose hands the work will be placed will see to that. However, the traders’ compllaint just now is that they cannot get a reasonable profit oil the sale of their goods; that everything is tending in the other direction.