PARAFFIN V. MONEY.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 949, 4 June 1881, Page 2

PARAFFIN V. MONEY.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —You have helped very considerably in the past to notify matters relating to the management of the South Pacific Petroleum Company, and it app*«*rs to me that your aid is still required. We have got rid of one bete noir, since which time an important and substantial advance has been made, which no doubt would have caused a very considerable rise in the value of the property, but for the want of confidence in the management in Sydney. No better evidence could have been afforded of the justness of this suspicion, than in the action of the Board recently respecting the issue of the balance of the unallotted shares. These shares, which have been fatally hurled in the market twice previously—once at a premium of 6d (I think), viz., at Is 6d per share, and the second time at 6d discount, or 6d per share for Is paid. The third time has just occurred, when the shares were offered pro rata at par [ls 6d per share], with the unbusiness-like condition that applications should be accompanied by the whole of the money, and were to be sent into the agent’s hands the day after a call of 3d per share fell due. Thus — on the 31st ult., 3d per share fell due. On the Ist inst., the shareholders were asked to apply pro rata for 9,200, or about one in five of their holding ; the total sum of which sale would be more than equivalent to an additional fourpenny call. This is a fair sample of the unbusiness-like operations of our foreign and irresponsible Board of Directors. Mismanagement does not, however, end here. Instead of appointing immediately a properly qualified refiner, who would know all about the extraordinarily rich mineral so singularly re-opened by Mr. Wright, who knows nothing, nor pretends to know anything, about mineral oils or paraffin, this grand property is again humbugged by the Directors sending instructions to the agent; which he, with faithful obedience, proceeds to carry out, at a very considerable expense, some prospecting works in order to gauge the depth, width, and length of the deposit, and which operations, in the manner they are set’ about, will cost, or waste, the Company perhaps, some more hundreds of pounds, while the same sum spent in obtaining the mineral that is now in sight would give most handsome returns to the Company, and would not only totally prevent any necessity for further calls on the shareholders, but the Company very shortly in the list of dividendpaying Companies. I have every reason to believe that the local agent is acting in a conscientious manner in what he is do ng ; but as he has had no previous experience of the mineral he has to deal with, I consular, in justice to the shareholders, he should have refused to go to work in the manner he is doing, and should have requested the Board to send over a qualified man. At the present moment there is a refiner out of employment in Sydney, who made for me a sample of perfectly pure white crystaline paraffin out of the paraffin shale from Hartley, commonly known as kerosene shale, a sample of which is in the window of the Southern Cross Petroleum Company. I consider that the mineral can be obtained in very large quantities, and the local agent has, so he I as informed me, the same opinion. Its value, according to all estimates, is equal to two ounces of gold to the ton net. As everybody knows sufficient of goldmining to understand the A B C of it let me ask one question :—What would b( thought of the man who, having found a twoounce reef, with say [for a small thing] hun dreds of tons in sight, refrains from touchin J a single ton of his quartz until he has sunl shafts all round to find the direction of its dil and strike, and its persistency ? Everybodl ought to know that the paraffin mineral it semi-fluid, and that as the petroleum is coni stantly rising from its seat some distance il the earth below, and evaporating by its proil imity to the atmosphere, and producing moil of the condensed mineral, it is rather a hopcl less job to attempt to gauge it in the mannl now being attempted.—l am, Ac., x Wm. Clarke. I