ALLEGED SERIOUS MINING FRAUD.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 13 September 1901, Page 4

ALLEGED SERIOUS MINING FRAUD.

A Document said to be Tampered with.

Enquiry by the Dunedin Stock

Exchange.

(our own correspondent.) Du>edin, This Day,

During the past month a firm of brokers has apparently been guilty of an act in relation to the transference of shares, for which the law prescribes a maximum penalty of imprisonment for life. That act was the erasure by a chemical agency on the terms in which consideration money was stated in the transfer shares.

The holder of certain shares in a wellknown dredging company placed fifty in the hands of aof a broker for sale. They were disposed.of in two lots of twentyfive, and the holder received a cheque for his shares, and signed two transfers, which wore in proper form. These transfers seem after this to have passed from hand to hand, the provisions of the Stamp Act being evaded in respect to the transactions subsequent to the initial one, until finally they reached a firm of brokers, who observed that no consideration money was stated. This in itself being an infringement of law they applied to the brokers employed by the original holder of the shares for fresh transfers. This the shareholder refused to give. He had received his money for the shares and had given a valid transfer. So far as he was concerned he had, he believed, done with the shares, but he not only declined to sign the fresh transfers, but he also notified the Stamp Office and the dredging company of the fact that had come under his notice that from transfers which, when signed by him, were in regular form, the statement of consideration money had disappeared and that he had been applied to for fresh tenders, which he had declined to give. The Stamp Office, upon receipt of this information, warned the company that any transfers from this holder should not be registered without being in the first instance submitted to the Deputy Commissioner for inspection. The brokers into whose hands the transfers had last come, upon finding themselves unable to obtain fresh transfers, threw the documents back on tne hands of the firm from whom they had received them. They did so less reluetantly because examination had revealed the fact that the consideration money expressed in the documents had been erased. More than "this, it was seen that the erasure had been effected through the employment of acids.

Back consequently the transfers went from hand to hand until they readied one office where they stuck. The Dunedin Stock Exchange inquired into the matter, but were unable to trace the fraud to the perpetrators.