MADAME HANAU MYSTERY

Taranaki Daily News, 15 April 1932, Page 7

MADAME HANAU MYSTERY

DISAPPEARANCE OF DOCUMENTS.

POLICE SEARCH BANK’S SAFE,

By Telegraph—Press Assn. —Copyright.

Paris, April 13. The Madame Hanau affair is developing into a first-class mystery. Police officials and the Minister of Finance are baffled as to how the secret document disappeared from the drawer of M. Flandin’s desk, of which he alone has a key. The document was a secret police report about Madame Hanau’s activities, which she printed in a copy of her paper Forces, which the police suppressed. In pursuance of their search the police demanded the directors of the bank where Madame Hanau had deposited her papers to open the safe or hand over the keys. The directors refusing, the police called in locksmiths who, after three hour’s, opened the safe by means of an oxy-acetylene plant.

As she was believed to be about to publish in her financial weekly paper, Forces, details from a secret document lost from the office of the Finance Minister (M. Flandin), the police arrested the famous Madame Hanau on a charge of theft of public documents. She was also accused of attempting to depress the Stock Exchange by articles professing to expose the real motive behind M. Tardieu’s Danube plan. . It is recalled that 'Madame Hanau was charged with fraud in connection with her Gazette du Franc and sentenced to imprisonment for two years. She had already served 18 months in prison and was therefore released, when she lodged an appeal, which is pending. Madame Hanau and her chief partner and former husband, M. Lazore Bloch, were arrested in December, 1928, on a charge of fraudulently obtaining money for investment in the various financial concerns connected with the Gazette du Franc. Inquiry suggested that the Gazette du Franc had been founded for the purpose of persuading the general public to entrust their savings to these concerns, and that very large sums had been in this way obtained by Madame Hanau and her associates. The trial was delayed for some time by the illness of Madame Hanau, who went on hunger-strike in 1930 during her custody in prison. She was eventually sentenced in March, 1931.