CAPTAIN AYLMER (for Mr. GRANTHAM)asked the Secretary of State for India, Whether the Master of the Rolls having refused to allow the Official 621 Liquidator of the Madras Irrigation and Canal Company to accept the offer of Her Majesty's Government to purchase the Company's Undertaking for sums amounting in the whole to £1,391,217 4s. 2d., on the conditions following, viz., that it should be divided between the Company's ordinary stockholders, and its officers, and the mortgagees of the Undertaking, so that the stockholders should be repaid the whole of their capital with a premium of six per cent., and the officers should receive a douceur of £12,000, while the mortgagees should accept, in discharge of their securities, three-fourths only of their capital, and should also forego two years' interest thereon, Her Majesty's Government will modify those conditions so as (without increasing the total amount to be paid by the Government) to give the mortgagees their principal and interest, or to leave to the decision of the Court the mode of division, among the parties interested, of the sum offered by the Government for the Undertaking; and, if not, on what grounds do they refuse to modify their conditions as to division; and, whether the Government will lay upon the Table of the House a Letter from the Eight Honourable Edward Pleydell Bouverie, dated 2nd October, 1880, to the Secretary of State for India; Viscount Enfield's reply thereto, dated 6th November, 1880, Mr. Livingstone Learmonth's letter's to the Secretary of State for India in Council, dated respectively 5th July, 1881, and 5th August, 1881, and the replies (if any) which may have been given thereto?
THE MARQUESS OF HARTINGTONSir, the facts are as suggested by the Question; but I may remark, in passing, that the "capital" referred to means the amount for which the mortgagees hold debentures, not the amount paid by them, which was 82 per cent. The Master of the Bolls declined to sanction the arrangement, merely because a statutory majority of the mortgagees had not accepted the terms offered to them. I see no reason in the events which have recently occurred for modifying the conditions referred to in the Question. The Board of Directors of the Company made certain proposals which we accepted; and I have not received from the representatives of the Company any further communications on the subject. There is no objection to 622 the Letters of the 2nd of October and the 6th of November, 1880, being given, The Correspondence of 1881 is not yet complete, but may be given in a few days.