FREAK COMPANIES.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIII, 17 May 1922, Page 8

FREAK COMPANIES.

If company flotation continues on its present lines, we shall soon have limited liability concerns no less curious than the companies promoted in the time of the Sbuth Sea Bubble. One was then suggested for planting mulberry trees and breeding silkworms in Chelsea. Park, another for “carrying on a project of great advantage. but nobody to know what it is,” and a third to discover the land of Ophir, and monopol.se the gold and silver in that country. Stock-jobbers, too, actually dealt m shares in companies for exploiting a wheel for perpetual motion, for transmuting quicksilver into a “’malleable and fine metal,’ and so on.

We cannot equal these enterprises yet, but we are getting on. A few years ago a company was floated for extracting gold from the sea, and the lofty aim of another was to populate (with a capital of £100), the “waste places of the earth.”

Curious, too, are the several companies still in existence. The object of most of them is the finding of buried treasure in various parte of the world, but one is for financing and supporting a claim to an estate at home.

Of late years, moreover, many companies just as remarkable, except in object, as those of the reign of George 1., have been registered at Somerset House.

A striking instance was one for working a safety explosive. The capital offered for subscription was £20,000, and for underwriting this amount an additional £20,000 was issued in fullypaid shares. Rarely has the extremely speculative character of a company been indicated so clearly as it was by the terms in this case. The nominal capital of an insurance company again was £250,000, and yet all the cash actually subscribed by the public was a paltry £55, on which the directors took insurance risks to the amount of £500,000. This freak company was, of course, soon wound up. Other companies have been curious as departure from type in other directions. Many have had a capital of only £lOO, but probably in connection with only one of these has the remuneration of the directors been fixed at £lO4 per annum—that is, £4 yearly in excess of the whole of the registered capital!

A regular midget company was one with a capital of only £25, of which £l5 was offered for subscription in shares of one shilling each. It was for working a dub.

Numerous companies have offered special inducements to the “small” shareholder. Shares of ss, 4s, 3s 6d, 2s, Is 6d, and Is have been common, and last year some of one penny each were available. The company which made this departure was a cinema combine, with a capital of £2,000 in 480,000 shares of one penny each.

A contrast was “Oerlikon, Limited,” which was registered about the same time with a capital of £40,000 in 40 shares of £lOOO each. So, too, though to a lesser extent, was a company with a capital in only twenty shares.

The latest additions to freak companies are connected with big estates. Landowners are now turning themselves into' companies, because thereby they can evade taxation, which otherwise, they contend, would crush them out of existence. In death dues alone the saving under the new system is enormous. It is estimated that on ah estate of £lOO,OOO the duty under private ownership would amount to £14,000, whereas if it was a company Tees than £3500 would have to be paid.