The door was opened today to suits to recover millions of dollars in defaulted bonds issued in the United States under German law when Justice John MacCrate ruled in New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn that the German Government’s moratorium on bond payments does not apply to bonds floated before the moratorium.
The ruling was contained in a lengthy opinion in which Justice MacCrate ordered the German American Cable Company to accept for payment six matured $1,000 bonds held by Louis J. Goodman and to pay him interest on these.
Jacob Chaitkin, a lawyer with offices at 60 Wall Street, international law expert and leader of the anti-Nazi boycott, who represented Goodman, pointed out that this was the first time a court in the United States had ordered payment on defaulted German bonds where the contention was made that German law applied. In previous cases he had obtained judgments when bonds were issued under New York law.
The present case involved a $4,000,000 20-year, 7 per cent bond issue floated by the defendant company in 1925 to finance construction of a cable between Emden and the Azores. The plaintiff had attached a $12,000 account of the company with the Western Union Telegraph Co.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
