TURKEY: Abdul’s Heirs

Fixed in many a schoolboy’s memory is the fact that 15th Century George Duke of Clarence died in a butt of malmsey (aromatic grape) wine. Sleepy-eyed Abdul Hamil II, Sultan of Turkey, died in Magnesia, not a solution but a town in Asia Minor. At the time of his death (1918), though a prisoner of the “Young Turkish” government he was worth $1,500,000,000, was generally considered Richest Man in the World. Last week the Greek government agreed to pay $50,000,000 to nine of his widows, 13 of his children. Not only the heirs but many a U. S. tycoon rejoiced.

Sultan Abdul Hamid, called “Abdul the Damned” by phrasemaking historians, was crafty, cruel, ignorant,* yet at the beginning of the World War his personal estates included half the Province of Saloniki, holdings in the Island of Cyprus, Thessaly, Greece, Syria, Palestine and what is now the Kingdom of Irak, a goodly section of the rich tobacco lands of Macedonia (whence “Egyptian” cigarets) and about $25,000,000 in jewels. When he was deposed in 1909, all these were confiscated.

Five years ago numbers of British and U. S. financiers decided that Abdul the Damned’s heirs had a good case in international law. With the understanding that they were to receive a fat slice of any funds paid to Abdul’s heirs, they successively organized three corporations to push the legal battle: Anglo-Hellenic Corp., succeeded by Valideh Trust, Ltd., and finally Aegean Financial Trust. † Not satisfied with last week’s 50 millions from Greece, officials of the Aegean Financial Trust announced that they had every hope of obtaining an additional billion for their clients from the Kingdom of Irak.

* It is credibly reported that in 1907 he refused General Electric Co. permission to import a number of dynamos into Turkey because he had heard that they were machines capable of producing 1,200 revolutions a minute, synonymous in his Ottoman mind with instantaneous and perpetual anarchy.

† Other U. S. tycoons have organized other corporations on the same plan to recover Habsburg properties in Austria and Hungary.