THEFT OF £40,000 A YEAR.

Colonist, Volume LV, Issue 13735, 29 May 1913, Page 2

THEFT OF £40,000 A YEAR.

A discovery typical of many branches of Turkish financial administration has been made by the new Prefect of Constantinople in connection with the tolls of Galata Bridge' the busiest thoroughfare of the city, which crosses the Golden Horn. All day long a motley stream, made up of all the varied types of the most cosmopolitan city of the world, pass over this wooden bridge. Each must pay a halfpenny toll to the guardians, who" in long white coats stand in a row across each end of the bridge, and carriages pay tenpenco. Four years ago the receipts of the bridge were about £400 a day, the "Mail" explains, but for some 1 timo the new Prefect noticed they had not been more than £130. He set spies to work, and when paying a surprise visit to the /bridge at night himself detected one of the tollkeepers making up into a package a sum which he was in the habit of taking home each/ evening as a perquisite. The result of this closer supervision has been to bring the bridge tolls very nearly up to their former amount of £400 a day, and the fact is made clear that the dozen or so rough, scrubby-beard-ed Turkish Guardians who held out horny palms for one's "metalleek" have been dividing among themselves for the last three years an income of £-10,000 a year.