• U.S.

Business: Kreuger’s Trail

2 minute read
TIME

The trail of woe left by the late Matchmaker Ivar Kreuger widened last week to include the eight U. S. directors of International Match (TIME, March 21 et seq.). After months of inquiring into the financial and personal history of Matchmaker Kreuger, Oscar W. Ehrhorn, Federal referee in bankruptcy for stricken International Match, authorized Manhattan’s Irving Trust Co. as trustee for the company to sue the directors for an accounting of $100,000,000 allegedly lost through their negligence. Irving Trust charged that an additional $35,000,000 was dissipated in 22 illegal dividends paid out of capital, sued each director for the total dividends declared at dividend meetings he attended. The directors and the judgments asked in these suits, sure to be historic, are:

Percy Avery Rockefeller $31,416,000

Donald Durant 35,789,000

Francis Lee Higginson 21,073,000

Henry Osborne Havemeyer 27,877,000

Frederic Winthrop Allen 36,258,000

Samuel F. Pryor 28,597,000

Adrian Hoffman Larkin 34,596,000

John McHugh 34,377,000

“Had the defendants made prudent inquiry into the … affairs of International,” Irving Trust charged in the complaint, “or had they exercised a reasonable and prudent management of International, or had . . . caused to be presented to them . . . certified audits made in accordance with standard accounting methods, or had . . . properly discharged their duties … all the misapplication, conversion, waste, depletion and loss of International’s assets would have been prevented. . . .”

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