The Stark County Democrat

STANDARD Official is Troubled With the Usual Lapse of Memory

DESTROYED BY FIRE

New York, Oct. 14.—Hampton C. Westcott, vice president of the Standard Oil company of Kentucky, was asked at today's session of the Standard Oil inquiry before Referee Ferris to give in detail the transactions his company had with independent selling companies in the southern territory by which the independents were secretly bought up by the Standard's sub-company yet allowed to continue doing business under the guise of independents. Mr. Westcott mentioned a dozen companies in which his company had acquired an interest but which had continued doing a professed independent business for several years after that arrangement. In no instance, he said, did the Standard of Kentucky advertise the fact that it had acquired the smaller companies.

When H. M. Tilford, president of the Continental Oil company, a Standard subsidiary and of the Standard Oil company of California, was asked for further particulars about the selling of oil in the Pacific coast field he could not remember whether or not the Standard had contracts with the Union Oil company, an independent producing concern of California, by virtue of which the independent was to give up all manufacturing of stated oil products in exchange for the purchase of its crude. He was asked to produce the original contracts with the Union Oil company, but said that all the records of the California branch of the Standard company were burned in the San Francisco fire. An alleged copy of one of these contracts appears in the government bill.

A. H. Brainard, comptroller of the Standard Oil company of New Jersey, was called to tell what he knew about the various loans of large amounts standing in the records of some of the Standard's sub-companies against the names of P. S. Trainor and James McDonald. The witness said that the Southern pipe lines' vouchers held by the Standard of New York did not represent Trainor's losses incurred while selling oil for the Southern Pipe line. He did not know what those entries on the Southern's books meant, nor could he account for the loans made to McDonald, the Standard's London representative and chairman of the board of directors of the Anglo American Oil company.

Mr. Brainard professed ignorance of the loan of $32,716.20 made last year by the Standard Oil company of New Jersey to "outside interests," as the books have it.

William Rockefeller made up the part of books containing this account, said Brainard.