A KING OF FINANCE

Taranaki Daily News, 29 August 1928, Page 6

A KING OF FINANCE

LOEWENSTEIN’S DEATH SON OF A BANKER. RISE TO GREAT WEALTH. London, July 13. Speculation is still going on as to the manner of Captain Alfred Loewenstein’s disappearance. Can a man open the exit door of an airplane without exerting tremendous force? The answer to that question, it is consided, should decide whether the great financier met his death by accident or be design. M. Loewenstein, who was accompanied by his valet, Mr. F. Baxter, and two shorthand-typists, left Croydon about 6.45 p.m. in hrs own airplane, a Fokker machine, which was pHU'd by Mr. Donald Drew, of Imperial Airways, Ltd. From all accounts, M. Loewenstein was in good spirits when he left Croydon. During the early stage of the flight he was reading; then he put down his book and retired to a small cabin at the rear of the saloon and in front of the bulkhead, which divides the passenger section of the machine from the luggage compartment right aft. To obtain an accurate impression of what happened it is necessary to understand that when the door of the small cabin is open it acts as a partition, completely shutting off the cabin from the passenger saloon. On the other side of the small cabin is the door on the port side of the fuselage. It is suggested that in one of those fits of extreme absent-mindedness with which M. Loewenstein was occasionally troubled, he mistook his way back into the saloon. To get there he would have merely to pull baek the cabin door into its normal position, whereas if he opened the door of the hull he would drop out into space, and the passengers at the other side of the barrier formed by the cabin door would remain in entire ignorance of what had happened.

When M. Loewenstein had been absent from the saloon for near! a quarter of an hour the members of his staff became anxious. The valet went to investigate, and found that his master had disappeared. The catch of the fuselage door was down, and it seemed apparent that M. Loewenstein, having unloosed this instead of merely restoring the cabin door to its normal position, had been flung 4000 ft down into the sea. BUSINESS ENTERPRISES. M. Loewenstein was born in Brussels in 1879, the son of a Jewish banker, apparently no more than modestly wealthy. Before he was twenty, Alfred Loewenstein had achieved local fame by some spectacular coups on t' Brussels Stock Exchange, and when he succeeded to his father’s banking business be began to launch out into international finance. A man whose activities embraced the remotest corners of the globe, and who had a finger in every financial pie, can scarcely be said to have had a specialty, but if one thing interested him more than others it was the development of electrical enterprises. He became acquainted with Dr Pearson, one of the pioneers of electrical industry, and under the stimulus of this friendship embarked on the international enterprises which first won for him a wider fame. He associated himself with electric lighting, power, and tramway concerns in Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. With the support of Dr. Pearson, he created the great Barcelona Traction Company, one of his largest schemes, and from this enterprise sprang the famous “Sidro”—the International HydroElectric Power Company. Always drawn to whatever savoured of novelty, Loewenstein’s , restless imagination was next captured by the artificial silk industry. His battle” with Dr. Henry Dreyfus, of the British Celanese Company, is still fresh in the public memory. By lightning coups, spectacular airplane dashes, or mysterious moves behind the scenes, Loewenstein repeatedly endeavoured to secure control of companies whose directors were often hostile to his intentions. Many times he succeeded, but in the case of the British Celanese he was finally obliged to retire from the struggle, leaving Dr. Dreyfus in control.

So great was M. Loewenstein's personal influences in the city that whenever the slightest accident befell him — a hunting mishap, or, on one ' ;casion, a narrow escape from being struck by an airplane propeller—the shares of the concerns with which he was associated fluctuated alarmingly. Yet, however important his financial interests, he still remained a shade -w figure in the public imagination. Then, two years ago, came his astonishing plunge into the finance of nati ns. While staying at Biarritz, with a train of politicians in his wake and a fleet of airplanes at his call, Loewenstein sudden'- announced— not through political or financial channels, but in a telegram to a Brussels newspaper—that he would place £10,000,009, free of interest for two years, at the disposal of the Belgian Government for the rehabilitation of the national currency. THIRTY MILLION OFFER. Surprise at this sensational announcement was. hardly abated before the financier capped it with a still more grandiose offer. He now promised £30,000,000 to France for the same purpose of stabilising the franc. Manipulating millions as others might manipulate thousands, Loewenstein offered £10,000,000 immediately, with a further £20,000,000 to follow. His offer to his own country amounted virtually to a munificent gift, but in the case of France he asked a modest 2 per cent, interest.

Even more astonishing than the magnitude of these offers was the fact that for days after they had become the talk of the whole world the Governments of France and Belgium had absolutely no official cognisance of them. When at last these outwardly splendid schemes were explained, both Governments refused them, and M. Loewenstein’s excursion into national finance ended as abruptly as it had begun.

The character of an English country gentleman might be supposed to be the very opposite of that with which the public imagination endowed this cosmopolitan financier. Yet he was greatly attached to England; he bought an estate near Melton Mowbray, and spent ■nnnh of his time hunting. He hunted

more packs, and with Madame Loewenstein entertained on a large scale. His stud of hunters was regard 1 as one of the best in Leicestershire, and he was always superbly mounted. A FRIEND’S TRIBUTE. A personal friend of the financier has this to say of him: “I have never admired any man more than Loewenstein. The key to his character is found in his love of work and devotion to any task he had in hand. His brain-power was colossal. He could reel off the accounts of eight different companies from memory without a single error. He possessed colossal courage. Nothing could shake his nerve. I never admired him more than at a hostile general meeting of the Sidro Company in Brussels eighteen months ago. He was outvoted and removed from the control. He stood calmly before the infuriated shareholders and never turned a hair, merely remarking, Tn a short time you will want me back? Within a year he was once more in control of the company. I have seen him almost every day during the past two months, and I have never known him more cheerful and confident. Apparently he had not a serious care in the world. The recent decline in International Holdings made no difference to him personally, except to diminish his colossal fortune on paper for the time being. Ho never speculated in these shares, but had bought them outright. He had no huge differences to cover on the Stock Exchange. His death to me is inexplicable. It can only have been an accident.” The suggestion is made that Loewenstein had an attack of blood pressure. His collar and tie were found in the airplane lavatory after his disappearance. This fact suggests that he had heart attack, that he tore off his collar and tie in order to breathe more freely, and, finding this relief insufficient, forced open the exit door of the airplane to obtain fresh air. The great exertion of forcing the door against the wind may have caused him to become unconscious, and thus he may have collapsed and fallen out. One of the most discussed features of the case concerns the difficulty .which, according to many experts, the banker would have experienced in opening accidentally the door from which he is believed to have dropped into the sea. In this connection an interesting experiment was carried out at Le Bouget aerodrome by the Dutch company which exploits the Paris-Rotterdam air line, usLig Fokker machines similar in design to .that from which M. Loewenstein disappeared. They sent up a machine in which two mechanics were to try to open the exterior door of the cabin during the flight. According to the account of the experiment given by the Paris representative of the company who witnessed it, the two mechanics, both men of normal physical strength, found it impossible by their united efforts to open the door sufficiently wide to allow a person to pass through. It should bo remembered, however, that M. Loewenstein was a man of exceptional physical strength and iron will-power. He was, in short, a man who, finding that a door seemed to stick, might be expected to wrench at it with every ounce of power at his command.

Tests by the Air Ministry on. the very machine from which Loewenstein fell showed that it required the strongest exertion to open the door against the wind of flight. Loewenstein’s body was picked up by French fishermen in the Channel in a battered and decomposed state. Dr. Paul, a Paris analyst, at the request of relatives, conducted a post-mortem on the remains, and discovered toxic matter, but it was pointed out in a cable message that the presence of this might be purely accidental, and it was not to be assumed that poison had either been taken or administered.