SINGULAR BANK ROBBERY AT HOBART TOWN, TASMANIA.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 7, Issue 364, 5 April 1866, Page 3

SINGULAR BANK ROBBERY AT HOBART TOWN, TASMANIA.

(From the Melbourne Age.) As action at law has just been instituted against the Union Bank, which has excited a very large amount of interest amongst the mercantile community. The cause of action has arisen out of a robbery of Government debentures to the value of £10,450 j and the sensational character of the case has been in no small degree intensified by the fact'that the property was abstracted from a safe in the strong room of the establishment, where it had been deposited for secure keeping by a gentleman named Lewis, a resident in Hobart Town, who, for many years past, has kept a large account with the bank. But the romantic part of the story does not end even here. The thief was the cashier of the Bank, and this gentleman obtained access to the insecure securities, not by either of the vulgar and difficult processes of making a hole through a wall, or breaking a window or door, but by the simple, and gentlemanly plan of walking into the vault in virtue of his office, as a confidential servant of the institution, and taking the box bodily away. And even yet the strangest features of the history have not been disclosed. The cashier, riot content with comprising his principals, by himself carrying off the property, employed the bank locksmith to pick the lock of the safe for him, and has long since converted the proceeds of his theft into cash, and taken up his abode in England, where he is said to be at present very respectably and pleasantly domiciled. The robbery was committed upwards of two years ago, and it is well-known in whose hands most, if not all of the debentures are held at the present moment; and yet there seems no likelihood whatever of any alteration in the anomalous relative positions of the three parties to the transaction* Neither the bank nor the owner of the stolen debentures, each acting, no doubt, under the direction of legal advisers, appears disposed to institute criminal proceedings against the felonious cashier; and as the bank has unequivocally signified its determination not to refund the value of the abstracted property, and the general opinion appears to be that the owner has no legal chum against the institution, the position of affairs can scarcely be said to be very reassuring to bank depositors. The public will be startled to find, if the result of the action -should be averse to the plaintiff, that the place where property is less safe anywhere else is a bank'safe, and that the man who can perpetrate robbery thegreatest impunity ii a bank cashier." " *