Bank Auditors

Bank Auditors

Bank Auditors

Posted on: January 08, 2012 - 4:33 am
by Admin

When the Home Bank failed on 18 August 1923, its liabilities totalled $15.5 million and its assets were estimated at $2.7 million. An orgy of reckless lending and self-dealing, fuelled by avarice, ambition and willful blindness, brought down a bank whose origins never hinted at such impropriety.

Early Days

The bank, originally called the Toronto Savings Bank, was founded in the mid-1800s by a Roman Catholic bishop to safeguard his thrifty parishoners' savings. Business was brisk - virtually every priest and Catholic organization in Toronto was a depositor - and the bank prospered.

However, by 1900, Colonel James Mason was running the bank. Mason was a crony of entrepreneur Henry Pellatt, having previously served in Pellatt's personal militia regiment, the Queen's Own Rifles. Pellatt had founded the Toronto Electric Light Company in 1883 and within six years had secured a monopoly to supply street lighting to Toronto. The resulting profits were funneled into new ventures: by 1901, Pellatt was chairman of twenty-one companies. (He was also planning his Toronto estate, which included a castle-like manor to be called Casa Loma.) Both men were viewed as brash outsiders by the establishment families that effectively controlled Toronto's financial markets, and both chafed at the unspoken disdain.