Promoter

“ It means, to use Chief Justice Cockburn’s words, a person “who undertakes to form Promoters and promotion. a company with reference to a given project and to set it going, and who takes the necessary steps to accomplish that purpose.” Whether what a person has done towards this end constitutes him a promoter or not, is a question of fact; but once an affirmative conclusion is reached, equity clothes such promoter with a fiduciary relation towards the company which he has been instrumental in creating. ”

“ This individual had been in business for many years, nevertheless the promoter induced him to reorganize his successful business on a much larger capitalization. The promoter made an agreement with this man to sell the stock of the new company, and promised he would interest his friends, the Astors, Goulds, and Vanderbilts. As a partial consideration for this he was to receive this mans beautiful home and a certain percentage of the stock. ”

“ Company promoters have an imagination of their own. There's no more romantic temperament on earth than the temperament of a company promoter. Engineers came out, coolies were imported, bungalows were put up on Samburan, a gallery driven into the hillside, and actually some coal got out. ”

“ A Private Corporation must have protection! Self-preservation is the first consideration, the first law. I am full of little formulas of both manner and speech—they afford me ample protection. Make-talk is the complete salvation of the female Banker (social) . I never disdain the use of a promoter, no matter how trivial it may be. Promoters help you to float heavy, stupid men, and save you from a complete wreck on the shores of stupidity; and they act as most excellent elicitors when applied to clever men—draw out the very best in them. ”

“ No man has right to assume that a promoter who sells stock by means of display advertising in the newspapers is per se a Get-Rich-Quick operator. There are honest professional promoters of the display advertising variety and there are dishonest ones, just as there are honest promoters of the multimillionaire kind and dishonest ones.
The on-the-level, trumpet-tongued mining promoter, who believes in newspaper advertising and successfully finances companies by appealing uproariously to the speculative investing public, performs an actual service and is entitled to a place among honorable men. ”

“ A real promoter is a genius who possesses both business ability and the necessary wherewithal to start, accelerate and carry on any kind of an industrial, financial or commercial enterprise.
You will meet the promoter in one shape or another as soon as it becomes noised around that you have an invention of merit. The ordinary promoter will be of assistance to you at any stage of the invention where experiments are still to be made and the patent is yet to be granted. He may also prove of service after the preliminary work is done in securing for you a real promoter. ”

“ They have the power of defining how and when and in what shape and under what supervision it shall start into existence and begin to act as a trading corporation.” Such a control over the destinies of the company involves correlative obligations towards it, and one of these obligations is that the promoter must not take advantage of the company’s helplessness. ”

“ An ordinary promoter will ask about 25 per cent. of whatever money he brings in for your use in developing the invention and a certain small interest—1 to 5 per cent.—in the company that exploits it. The real promoter wants and usually gets a working agreement of 50 per cent, of whatever profits there may be made out of the invention. ”

“ The promoter of trusts performs in some ways a substantial economic service. A promoter is one who undertakes to convert a number of unrelated factories, or establishments, into a trust, or combination. He gets options on different factories, that is, the right to buy them at an agreed price within certain time limits. He gets some banking house to underwrite the combination, that is, to agree to dispose of a number of shares to the investing public. ”

“ The promoter of an enterprise on borrowed capital is practically but the agent of the lender. He may be the director and manager but he so conducts his undertaking as to gather the usury from others. When the opportunities for profitable investments become rare, and money accumulates and is lying idle, such promoters with their schemes are encouraged in order to gain a profit on the investment, though others suffer by it. ”

“ The value of group promotion, to the promoter, is, that as long as one claim shows promise, the shares keep selling. The public loves to gamble. Keith came back this trip and proposed to purchase a lot of claims that are nothing but plain rock, surface dirt and sage-brush. They are not even on the main gulch. ”

“ A tin-horn promoter is an unprincipled fellow of some ability who secures an option on a patented invention, or on the stock of a company based on an invention, and exploits it for all he is worth to his own profit and without regard to the inventor or the stockholders. The chief business of a tin-horn promoter is to secure control of the entire stock issue of a company, sell it at inflated prices, pocket 90 per cent. ”

“ The promoter is the agent of the corporation and subject to the disabilities of an ordinary agent. His acts are scrutinized carefully, and he is precluded from taking a secret advantage of the other stockholders. Cook, Stock & Stockholders, § 651. 'Accordingly, it has been held that, if persons start a company, and induce others to subscribe for shares, for the purpose of selling property to the company when organized, they must faithfully disclose all facts relating to the property which would influence those who form the company in deciding upon the judiciousness of the purchase. ”

“ A promoter who is to make a contribution in kind shall deliver the pertinent property, without delay, on the date fixed for the payment of the subscription price, and if registration, recording or the creation or transfer of a right is required, he shall prepare completely the documents thereon and deliver them to the company. ”

“ In many cases—probably most cases—the owner of the thing to be promoted has no money with which to pay the promoter. Consequently, the promoter first satisfies himself that the enterprise actually holds possibilities of profit and then agrees to accept all or a part of his fees in the stock of the company. The portion of his fee that he is willing to accept in stock, and the number of shares demanded, is governed largely by his own faith in the enterprise. ”

“ In recent years in the United States there can be little question that the formation of the great combinations has been much encouraged by the opportunities, which promoters were able to seize, of making for themselves large profits. The movement towards combination was so fully recognized and the advantages in many cases so palpable, that a well-informed and skilful promoter was often able to persuade a large proportion of the manufacturers in some special industry to combine. ”

“ If a person urges others to form a company and buy something he has to sell, and does not himself become identified with the organization, he is not a promoter in the above sense, and may obtain the best price he can induce the company to pay for his property. A corporation, when organized, is not liable for any ‘contracts’ entered into on its behalf by the promoter prior to its organization. ”

“ Surely it would be as just to assume that the baby-farmers and promoters of home employment whose [326] effusions we have quoted were fair representatives of ordinary commerce, as that the “discretionary-investment” promoter is in any way connected with the legitimate bookmaker. ”

“ Oh, we have plenty of indications. How many shares do you want?"
"Pop, what is a promoter?"
"A promoter, my son, is a man who can make either a dollar or a penny look like thirty cents."—Life.
PROMPTNESS
On the occasion of the death of a chief of one of the department bureaus in Washington, a clerk in that bureau was dashing madly down the street when he was stopped by a friend, who asked: "Why the deuce are you in such a tearing hurry?"
"I am going," explained the clerk, "to the funeral of my chief, and there is nothing he hates like unpunctuality." ”

“ Associated with the promoter in the organization of these combinations have usually been bankers or other financiers who stood ready, for an amount of stock or other promised profit sufficiently large to compensate them for their risk, to furnish to the combinations cash sufficient to start the business and to provide other needed capital. ”

“ True regulation is for the equal benefit of the consumer and the investor, and the only man who will suffer from true regulation is the speculator or the unscrupulous promoter who levies tribute equally from the man who buys the service and from the man who invests his savings in this great industry. ”

“ Aristogiton the sycophant, or false promoter, was condemned to death for troubling men with wrongful imputations.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals, p. 421.
His eyes be promoters, some trespass to spy. Tusser, Of an envious and haughty Neighbour.
Promoters be those which in popular and penal actions do defer the names or complain of offenders, having part of the profit for their reward.—Cowell, The Interpreter, s. v.
Covetousness and promotion and such like are that right hand and right eye which must be cut off and plucked out, that the whole man perish not.—Tyndale, Exposition of the Sixth Chap. ”

“ Those who begin an enterprise like this, the promoters we call them, always have a certain advantage over the others whom we take into the company. We are on the ground floor, you know, at the beginning of things, and the others we take in above. ”

“ Turning to company promotion, it is certain that hundreds of millions of capital have been wasted in the last twenty years through the dangling of fancy baits before the possessors of unearned increment. The company promoter obtains from Somerset House the names and addresses of shareholders in such concerns as those referred to in Chapter 8, and so is enabled to send to persons who have already tasted the joys of "waiting" a prospectus promising them even larger slices of unearned increment than they already receive. ”

“ Friendly societies, as they are called, are on this account often to be much suspected. The story of one that smashed up is interesting and amusing. The chief promoter early in life displayed his abilities as a rogue. He became a letter-carrier, only to lose his situation and undergo a severe term of imprisonment for stealing letters. ”

“ Extravagant claims are made in which returns of 100 per cent. or more a year are said to be a sure thing. The influence of nationality, church, and fraternal orders are brought to bear in securing sales. The support of persons with good standing in the community is secured. Those who assist the promoter are given a reduction for their influence. The dope is given them often and systematically. So they soon realize the greatness of the project. This is promotion psychology. The land is offered at high enough price to permit reduction for quick sale, which bait works in many cases. ”

“ Black once more.
“But there is more surely than four and a half per cent. to be had now-a-days, is there not; in some of those great companies, for instance?”
“All swindles, ma’am,” declared the promoter. “Should not advise you, or at least your friend, to have anything to do with them. In the companies 4that are bona fide, all the shares are snapped up before the project is well before the public. Whenever you hear of shares going a-begging, depend upon it the whole concern is rotten.” ”

“ The professional Company Promoter we have 290had with us ever since Limited Liability brought him into being, and bitter experience during a generation and a half has enabled the public to at last gain a just view of him and his methods; but the public, at that time, still looked upon a nobleman as, almost of necessity, a man of honour. ”

“ To do this they become promoters who bring inventor and manufacturer together, agents who mediate between buyer and seller, peddlers, venders and all other middlemen who go between producer and consumer and live on a commission, also literary men who devote their talent to purposeless fiction belong to the class actuated by the lower phases of the force in the common signs. ”

“ It is not too much, indeed, to say that the fastening of an onerous or improvident contract on a company at its start, by interested promoters acting in collusion with the directors, has been the principal cause of the scandals associated with company promotion. ”

“ CHAPTER XIX Promoters and Projectors—Government loans—Commencement of Bank of England—Character of a Stock Jobber—Jonathan’s—Hoax temp. Anne—South Sea Bubble—Poems thereon.
We are apt to think that company promoters and commercial speculation are things of modern growth, but Projectors and Patentees (company promoters and monopolists) were common in the early seventeenth century; and we find an excellent exposition of their ways and commodities in a poetical broadside by John Taylor, the Water poet, published in 1641. ”

“ In addition to economies due to improvements in methods of organization, production and marketing, another cause for the sudden and vigorous outburst of trust promotion in the years 1898-1902 may be found in the profits to be secured by promoters and organizers. After the successful launching of the first few trusts, with their undoubted economies and advantages, the movement was taken in hand by professional promoters, who organized combinations, often with the help of underwriters, in every branch of industry where there was any promise of profit. ”