GERMANY’S HIDDEN WEALTH.

Hokitika Guardian, 27 December 1923, Page 4

GERMANY’S HIDDEN WEALTH.

EVADING REPARATIONS

How the rich German industrialists manage to smuggle capital abroad and place large sums in foreign banks and foreign investments is explained with great clearness by ALAI. L. Wulsohn and G. We rule in "IV Evasion ties Cap-i----taux Alemands” (Societe Anonyme d Editions, 71, Rue tie Provence, Paris). That wellknotnt authority Aj. Victor Cambon contributes a preface, in which he points out that the authors are experts. These German balances and investments are dangerous to the countries where they are placed : They are an alien inHuenee in the economic organisation ol neutral States and even of the Anglo-Saxon countries—an inlluem-e which is guided by other considerations than the economic needs of those nations, and which creates discord between capital and the needs of the national economy. Tho large-scale smuggling i“ 1 amed out by arranging that German exports ' shall be fraudulently undervalued, and that the main part ol the payment for them shall remain abroad, in the form of credits for those who export them, though the German trade statistics are so arranged as to hide this method of action: In one particular ease i the German exports to Switzerland of metal-worx-ing machinery) the value as deelaied in the German Customs i one-third that estimated by tho Swiss Cu-toms. This helps to explain the mystery of Gorman exports, which, in official statistics, are so low that (oimany “canuoi allon.l ivpai.itions.” Another method of smuggling capital out of Germany is for German industrialists to arrange by collusion with neutral or foreign agents that they shall he required to pay afres.i accounts which they have already <k - charged for goods bought in .Switzerland in HR 7 and ]9lB. Thus t Hoy can defeat the not very close scrutiny ol the German Government- officials, whose consent is required [or the transmission o| German funds abroad.

The authors decline to give a ligme for the German capital which has been placed abroad, but they state that ‘'it is no exaggeration to speak of thousands of millions oi I rimes (a thousand million Swiss Irattes is £-h).IJ-.. COO). At the same time, most Gorman enterprises are being placed under a control which is nominally eeii-tt-al. by mortgaging them to neutral firms or companies. These are really Germans operating through men ol straw. The whole aim ->f this vtiH system lof fraud is to evade reparations.