FOREIGN TRADE: Sewed Up

Up before a stockholders' meeting of the Singer Manufacturing Co. in Man hattan last week stepped President Sir Douglas Alexander, 81. The British-born president had bad news. The company's big sewing machine factory at Wittenberg, in the Russian zone of Germany, had been "evacuated" by the Russians, lock, stock & shuttle, to Podolsk, U.S.S.R.

This confirmed what many a U.S. businessman had long suspected: that the Russians were stripping some American-owned factories to help meet German reparations. How many other plants have gone the way of Singer was not known.

Actually, the Russian action was not as larcenous as it looked....

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