.

B. On May 22 Lloyd George and Elibank bought 3000 more shares at
L2.5/32. As they were not due to deliver the shares previously sold
by them at L3.6.6 and L3.5/32 till June 20, this new purchase had
something of the look of a "bear" transaction.

C. In April and May the Master of Elibank bought 3000 shares for the
account of the Liberal Party, of whose funds he had charge.

These three transactions are all that the three politicians ever
admitted, and nothing more was ever proved against them. As we have
seen there was no documentary evidence of the principal transaction
(the one I have called A), except that Rufus sold 7000 shares on
April 19. In his acquiring of the shares, no broker was employed.
Rufus did not pay Harry for the shares until January 6, 1913, some
nine months later, when the enquiry was already on. There was no
evidence other than his own word that 10,000 was the number he had
agreed to take or L2 the price that he had agreed to pay, or that he
had bought from Harry and not from Godfrey, or that of the 7000
shares he had certainly sold at a huge profit on April 19 half were
sold for Harry. There was, indeed, no evidence that the shares were
not a gift.

Even on what they admitted, they had obviously acted improperly. The
contract with the English Marconi Company was not yet completed,
Parliament had not been informed of its terms, Parliament therefore
had yet to decide whether it would accept or reject it. Three members
of Parliament had committed two grave improprieties:

(1) They had purchased shares--directly or at one remove--from the
Managing Director of a Company seeking a contract from Parliament, in
circumstances that were practically equivalent to receiving a gift of
money from him. They received shares which the general public could
not have bought till two days later and then only at over 50% more
than the politicians paid.* (On this count, the fact that the shares
were American Marconis made no difference: the point is that they
were valuable shares sold to ministers at a special low price. This
need not have been bribery, but it is a fact that one way of bribing
a man is to buy something from him at more than it is worth, or sell
something to him at less than it is worth.)

[* H. T. Campbell of Bullett, Campbell & Grenfell, the English
Marconi Company's official brokers, gave evidence before the
Parliamentary Committee that it would have been impossible for the
general public to