THE INSULL CASE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22101, 3 November 1933, Page 9

THE INSULL CASE

GREEK COURT’S FINDING NO FRAUDULENT INTENTION. I

ATHENS, October 31.

The court decided that, although In« sull had possibly violated the letter of the law, he was without fraudulent intention. Further. Insull, using hia good name as a personal guarantee, did everything to maintain the credit of the company. Moreover', after the bankruptcy he remained in America.

There was loud applause in the court.

Samuel Insull was arrested in Athena at the request of the United States Government. In recent American history there is no parallel for the rise and fall of Samuel Insull, who began life in London, his birthplace, as a junior clerk, at 5s a week, at the age of 14, and became the greatest one-man corporation controller in the United States. Insull in 1892 began to devise plana to secure a monopoly of electric utilities in Chicago and the Middle West. By 190 T he had linked up the electric services of 40 towns, north and north-west of Chicago, in the Public Service Company of Northern Illinois. The company prospered, and, in 1912, he formed the Middle West Utilities Company, whose consolidated assets were stated at £250,000,000. In October, 1929, Insull defied the stock crash in the United States and went on buying stocks through his trusts. He went to President Hoover and assured him he would not shorten sail, but would operate all his companies at full capacity, for the good of the nation. The crisis came in April, 1932, when Middle West Utilities went into receivership through inability to meet a sum of about £1,200,000 due in June. Next day Insull’s second investment company' followed. On June 6 a Federal judge ordered his removal from control. The following day _he resigned from 56 corporations and sailed for Europe. Mr Charles G. Dawes, formerly vice-president, also an exAmbassador to Britain, and author of the Dawes Plan of reparations, stated before a committee of the Senate on February 16 last that his bank had violated .the principle of the law by granting loans to the Insull companies.