Manawatu Herald. SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 1902. The Manawatu Railway.

Manawatu Herald, 5 April 1902, Page 2

Manawatu Herald. SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 1902. The Manawatu Railway.

The shareholders of the above railway had. a happy family gathering on Wednesday at the annual meeting. The discussion appears, from the very full report published in the N.Z. Times, to have been fast and furious. All the trouble arose from the contemplated sale of the line to the Government. To those who have witnessed the initiation of the railway and its rise, the trouble shows a* lamentable want of grasp of facts by the shareholders, arising possibly from the want of understanding of the position of the Company. As the Chairman remarked “he wanted to know if all the directors were dummies.” First they had voted for a sale and then objected to it. The discussion brought out the fact that the directors and the chairman differed considerably as to the value of the property. The meeting ended by every resolution contrary to the wishes of the chairman being carried by those present, but defeated, on a poll, by the proxies held by that gentleman. The directors afterwards held a meeting at which the old chairman was set aside and a new one elected in his place, and it was understood that the board will proceed to obtain the opinion of the shareholders on the question of disp .sing of the railway and the other assets of the company to the Government, but as a preliminary will place before each shareholder a full and clear statement of the actual position of the company, the value of its line and other assets.

The railway was started by the Government giving over to the Company £50,000 of work and labour done on the proposed line prior to the Government giving up the work. The Company was also given large tracts of land through which the line was to run up this coast. In Wellington it is an everyday remark that the Company has been managed admirably, it is not our purpose to dispute this, but it evidently has not appeared so to the shareholders or why should they, be so anxious to get the Colony to take the lino over ? The position of the company must have also been greviously misunderstood by the early investors or why should they have been so pleased to sell at nineteen shillings a share when directors were argueing that they were worth thirty or thirty-two directors, BS goaraums of tua interests of the

shareholders, should in some way have let their partners (the shareholders) in this big concern know as much about the matter as they did themselves, but we find it stated that the chairman advised his co-directors to buy shares, which advice he admits he acted on to the best of his ability. Mr Duthie mentioned that whilst in Melbourne a complaint had been made to him by a shareholder as to “ how he had been sold in regard to his shares, which had been snapped up, and he had been derived of this little nest egg.” Much as we would like to see the Government the owner of the line, we desire to see the shareholders obtain a fair price for it, deducting therefrom the value of the former grants. It would appear from the statements made at a meeting that the writing down of values, wise as from a company view, have been too large from a selling point of view, but this is where an outsider cannot be expected to discuss satisfactorily when even the directors appear to be quite in the dark about. From the meeting we should say it was unlikely anything definite will be done by the first of May, the latest period under the special Act of last Session, and it is probable that the Government will go on its even tenor of its ways and leave the company to settle matters amongst themselves before it again engages to endeavour to come to terms with it. The coast suffers by the action of the meeting on Wednesday and it makes it clear that the Government are in no way to blame for the upset of negotiations. The meeting is not to the credit of the company and it would have been wisest to have had their “ washing-day,” as a shareholder termed it, in private instead of giving it so much publicity.