MONEY SPIDERS OF VIENNA.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XLIX, Issue 13905, 5 November 1919, Page 3

MONEY SPIDERS OF VIENNA.

With the rapid fall' in the value of the Austrian crown, all legitimate business is tending to cease, and commercial transactions are in the hands of the schleichhaiiders. most of them .lews. A sihleichhaudler is a smuggler. Austria has no export except "Arch--1 dukes to Switz.erland." as a business maii humorously put it. and, -therefore, theoreticailv she can receive no imports, but in Vienna and Budapest strict control at the frontiers, smuggling goes on apace between the various ■States, of which Austria is roughly the centre. , , - , The favorite method oi the sehleichhaudler is to act as a money-changer. Like a fat spider in a cunningly-woven web. he sits in a comfortable hotel in Vienna and watches the bourses in Prague. Agram. Warsaw, and Bucharest? All kinds of money interest him. The peseta, the kroner, the dinar, the leu. the dollar, and tho pound. He watches them all carefully until he sees on dav that German marks can be sold well 'in Agram, the capital of .lugo-Slavia. and dollars bought there cheaply. He knows also dollars arc dear m Vienna. He dispatches an agent-, with a large sum of German marks hidden in his clothing, with instructions to buy dollards in Agram. On the agent's return to Vieiiiui"tlie schleicliliandler will -lind that he has gained a profit of perhaps I )>er cent simply by dealing in money. There was the" case of a banker who made £50.000 in a few months by Inlying unstamped Austro - Hungarian crowns with stamped crowns at a gain of 4 per cent., sending an agent to Bucharest to buy Roumanian dei cheaply with the unstamped crown, and selling the lei the agent brought back for stamped crowns. The method of swindling has come to such a pass than Vienna newspapers complain that members'of minor legations in Vienna are selling diplomatic passes and seals to these schleichhandlers or their agents, so that they mav carry on their work unhindered bv'the strictest froutier control.