Jasper County Democrat, Volume 17, Number 96, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1915 — GENERAL AND STATE NEWS [ARTICLE]

GENERAL AND STATE NEWS

Telegraphic Reports From Many Parts of the Country. •- . . SHORT BITS OF THE UNUSUAL Happenings in the Nearby Cities and Towns—Matters of Minor Mention From Many Places. JASPER CIRCUIT SUPPORTED. Supreme Court Defines Obligations of Railroads. Indianapolis, March 6.-—The supreme court Friday affirmed the Jasper circuit court in giving to Bayard Taylor a judgment of SIO,OOO against the Chicago, Indiana & Southern Railroad -Company for services in promoting a line of railroad, matting surveys and other survlces which were made use of by the Chicago, Indiana & Southern Railroad Company. -

The court holds that a corporations which takes as owner, all the property and assets ■of another corporation which thus virtually ceases to exist except as a paper organization, is liable in equity for the obligations of the old company to the amount of the assets of the old company taken over and converted to Its use.

The court quotes with approval from a federal case where it'was said: "We are not prepared to say that it would make any difference if the members of the new company were none of them interested in the old. The thing which we pronounce unconscionable is an arrangement by which one corporation takes from another all its property, deprives it of the means of paying its debts, enables it to dissolve Its corporate existence and place itself practically beyond the reach of creditors, and this without assuming its liabilities.” The court says by the juggling in corporate formations the corporation owners could not obtain the benefit of Taylor’s services, and the expenses he had been to in obtaining the rights-of-way, surveys and other preliminary work, and then leave Taylor with nothing while the corporation enjoyed the benefits without paying for them.