Mining Swindles.

Thames Star, Volume XIII, Issue 4232, 25 July 1882, Page 2

Mining Swindles.

The debate in the Legislative Council on Friday, on the Mining Companies' Act Amendment Bill, was pretty lively. A clause of the bill provides that with respect to all shares sold the seller shall be liable-for bis proportion of the liabilities of the company incurred up to the day of selling the shares, the object being to prevent transfers to dummies to evade liabilities. Dr Pollen strongly condemned this as being retrospective legislation, inasmuch as existing shareholders had! bought in on the understanding that the moment they sold out they would be free of all liabiHty in respectH:o their shares, whereas by this provision they might be called on years afterwards to discharge obligations they never knew anything about This, he asserted, -therefore, would be arbitrarily interfering with tested interests, and would be -ex post facto legislation of the worst character, and by it even a man's heirs a hundred years hence might possibly be called on to pay obligations that had lain in abeyance. Ihe Doctor added that he never owned a mining share in his life, and, therefore, did not speak personally. The debate on the rogueries of mining was a long one, Dr Pollen saying that many companies had been got up simply for the sale of scrip, while Mr Whitaker showed the evils of dummyism by stating that at Auckland a street-sweeper once held more shares than all the rest of the community, as he was the recognised dummy for the town. Some of the shares transferred to him happened to turn put well, and then the fraud ulent transferors wanted them back, but^Lestrange was too sensible for them. Mr Whitaker added that though he had had a good deal to do with mining companies, he would never have anything to do with one formed under the Act of 1872, owing to the. system of swindling which the law allowed-under it. Dr Pollen asserted that the Act of 1872 was deliberately passed with great considera« tion, but to that Mr Whitaker replied that a Bill was never passed with less consideration. In 1872, he happened one day to go to the Law office, and found them engaged cutting clauses from a Bill which Sir Julius Vogel had brought back in his pocket from Melbourne, pasting the pieces on paper, and sending them off to the printer. There wes no debate on the measure, and it was so badly drawn, that many provisions which were suitable only to the circumstances of Victoria had been left, in it, and had coasequently never been operative here. Mr Miller mentioned that he had never had anything to do with mining scrip. Probably if he had, he would" have been a street sweeper by this time. Eventually this Bill of stringent provisions got through committee.