SAMUEL INSULL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22205, 7 March 1934, Page 7

SAMUEL INSULL

ORDERED TO LEAVE GREECE GOVERNMENT'S DECISION. , y ATHENS, March 5. The Government has ordered Samuel Insull to leave Greece immediately. 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 five shillings 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 plans to secure a monopoly of electric utilities in Chicago and the Middle West. By 1907 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 £14200,000 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 be resigned from 56 corporations and sailed for Europe, taking refuge in Greece. Mr Charles G. Dawes, formerly vice-president, also an exAmbassador to 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* loan* to the Insull companies.