£75,000 FINE ON GERMAN PROFITEER.

Taihape Daily Times, 29 October 1918, Page 7

£75,000 FINE ON GERMAN PROFITEER.

STATE ROBBED BY GREAT MUNITIONS WORKS. A fine of £7s,ooo—one of the largest ever inflicted in a German court of law —and six months’ imprisonment is the judgment in an extraordinary case just concluded in Elberfeld, in Germany. The villain of the piece is Herr Victor Kard Adels, director of the Mannesmann Waffen and Munitions Fabriken at Remscheld. The Mannesmann concern has always been able to rely on Government support for its tremendous business plans. Mannesmann interests in Morocco were largely those German interests which the German Government supported to the extent of sending the Panther to Agadir and of nearly plunging Europe into war. Herr Adels entered the Mannes-' mann service shortly before the wai at the modest annual salary of £3OO. His progress was meteoric. His firm was engaged in providing'vast quantities of munitions and military supplies for the army and navy, and by screwing up prices, by commissions, and by al sorts of trickery and fraud, Adels was able to make colossal profits and send his income soaring rapidly on high like a rocket. Enjoying the full confidence, of his employers, he was enabled to proceed on such lines that in the first three years of the war he earned personally no less than £275,000. Another director was his accomplice, but that individual escaped justice by committing suicide. Not only in the ways mentioned was Adels endeavouring to cheat the State. In the years 1915 and 1916 he only declared for the purposes of income and war profit taxes one-fif-teenth of his income, and in 1917 became so bold that he reduced the. fraction to one-twentieth. He was careful to send about £50,000 to Holland and Switzerland for safe keeping. In Germany people have been wondering if the legal authorities will have the courage to tackle the house of Krupp on the same count. That tremendous business pays exactly a million and a-half pounds in income tax, while the Daimler Company, with much smaller profits, has to pay £50,000 more.