TRADE IN DIAMONDS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 January 1944, Page 3

TRADE IN DIAMONDS

4 AMERICAN INDICTMENT OF CHASE NATIONAL BANK & DEALER. CONSPIRACY ALLEGED & DENIED. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) WASHINGTON, January 12. A Federal Grand Jury indicted the Chase National Bank and Leonard J. A. Smit, a diamond dealer, with conspiring and engaging in the illegal sale and export of industrial diamonds, violating the Trade with the Enemy Act. The Attorney-General, Mr Biddle, said Smit had established Elsantum Inc., in Panama as a non-American front for the sale of diamonds which reached Germanj r and Japan. The Chase National Bank was accused of aiding these operations by carrying on regular banking and credit transactions with the Smit firms. Mr Biddle described the indictments as the most significant application of the Trading with the Enemy Act to date. The immediate result would be shutting off one of the worst leaks in strategic industrial materials from America to the enemy. The chairman of the board of directors of the Chase National Bank, Mr • Winthrop Aldrich, declared that the indictments were a senseless outrage. All the acts complained of had happened before Pearl Harbour. The Chase Bank, like all other large banks, had many thousands of transactions involving an interpretation of the foreign exchange regulations. Smit pleaded not guilty.