Svelte Mrs. Ingeborg Eberth, who says she was Ivar Kreuger’s nearest & dearest friend, startled Stockholm last week with a bland announcement that some three weeks after his suicide (TIME, March 21) she received a letter in Ivar Kreuger’s handwriting.
“The letter was neither stamped nor postmarked,” said Mrs. Eberth, “but I believe it came from Russia. It contained only a few lines of greeting. I believe Ivar is alive!”
Originally Mrs. Eberth, believing her friend to be dead, said she would write “the life story of the man about whom I know more than anyone else.” Last week she may have been merely plugging for her book. But thousands of small Kreuger investors continue to hope that Kreuger will be caught alive. Complaints continue that his corpse was not shown in Paris or Stockholm (which would have settled all doubts) but sent to Sweden in a sealed coffin and privately cremated.
Not under suspicion when the Kreuger coffin arrived, Premier Carl Gustaf Ekman of Sweden was later accused of accepting Kreuger money for campaign purposes. He hotly denied this charge at first, then shamefacedly confessed and tendered his resignation to King Gustaf (TIME, Aug. 15). If the Premier of Sweden lied about Ivar Kreuger—so runs the small investors’ argument—who knows whether a man with the Great Scoundrel’s brains & money could not have “arranged” his suicide and cremation with the petty French and Swedish officials who certified the facts?
Large creditors centered some hopes last week on a writ served in Stockholm on Ernst Kreuger, the 80-year-old father of Scoundrel Ivar, and other directors of his collapsed holding company, Kreuger & Toll. The writ charges Father Kreuger & Directors with “gross negligence,” accuses them of letting Scoundrel Ivar do with the company whatever he liked, seeks to collect from the Board of Directors damages equivalent to the losses of Kreuger & Toll. How great these losses are, accountants who have been ferreting & figuring ever since last spring were still unable to say last week.
Stockholm police arrested Brother Torsten Kreuger last month when the receivers for Kreuger & Toll sued him for more than $1,000,000 in cash and securities which he was alleged to have received from Scoundrel Ivar some six months before the crash. It was Brother Torsten who flew to Paris and secured custody of Brother Ivar’s body without an autopsy being performed. At that time Brother Torsten had the diplomatic rank of a Swedish consul general, lived far more lavishly in Stockholm than Brother Ivar whom Swedes called “The Man Who Never Gambles.”
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