Netherlands American Mortgage Bank v. Connaway
Netherlands American Mortgage Bank v. Connaway
070rehearing
ON REHEARING.
The facts in this case are undisputed. They were succinctly set forth in the opinion filed herein. To repeat them would be an act of supererogation. Simply stated, the
Opinion of the Court
The facts in this ease, briefly stated, are as follows: The appellant is a foreign corporation, having an agent at Moscow, Idaho. The business of the said corporation is the loaning of money upon first mortgages on real estate, and to this, it would seem, their agent was limited, so far as loans were concerned. The agent of the appellant, one BarghoDm, held the position of assistant, or quasi assistant, cashier of the Moscow Bank. One R. S. Browne was at the time the president of the Moscow National Bank. . In fact, the inference from the evidence is that Browne was the National Bank of Moscow, if not de jure, at least de facto. The appellant had money on deposit with the Exchange National Bank of Spokane, Washington, against which their said agent, Barghoorn, was authorized to draw for loans upon real estate. It appears from the record that Browne was fully advised of the nature and extent of Barg-hoorn’s authority in relation to the funds of appellant against which he was authorized to draw. On or about the 15th of January, 1897, it seems a payment was about to be made by the United States government to the Nez Perces Indians at Lapawai, Nez Perces county, and, as these payments were to be made in treasury drafts, there was a visible profit to be made in the purchase of the same from the Indians. Of course, such a transaction was outside of, and prohibited by the law governing, the operations of a national bank. But the astute and ubiquitous
We are unable from the record to find anything in this transaction which tends to impress the loan from Barghoorn to Browne with the character of a trust in the bank. It was a simple loan from an individual to an individual, nothing more.
That Browne knew that Barghoorn was violating his trust in making the loan is no predicate for a charge against the bank; for Browne did not make the loan by or on behalf of the bank, but for his own personal profit. Had the money been loaned to Browne as president of the bank, for the use of the bank, or had it been deposited by Barghoorn as the agent of the appellant, under his known authority as such agent, a different case would be presented; but no such conclusion can be reached from the evidence. The mere fact that Browne put the money, which he
We have examined the authorities cited by the appellant, but we find no case where the conditions were at all similar to the case at bar. The trouble with appellant’s position and argument is that it assumes the existence of a state of facts not disclosed by the record, and ignores the primary and controlling fact in the case, to wit, that the loan from Barghoorn to Browne was purely a personal transaction, with which the bank had nothing to do, to which it was not privy, and for which it could no more be held responsible than it could for a larceny or any other criminality of Browne, and this condition could not be changed by any of the acts of the employees of the bank. We think the findings of the district court are fully sustained by the evidence. The judgment of the district court is affirmed, with costs to respondent.
Reference
- Full Case Name
- NETHERLANDS AMERICAN MORTGAGE BANK v. CONNAWAY, receiver
- Status
- Published
- Syllabus
- Trustee — Mingling Individual Money With Funds or Bank — Liability of Bank. — B., the president of a national bank, made a loan for Ms personal use, to be invested, as the lender understood, in a purely personal transaction of B. Held, that the fact that the money so borrowed by B. was, or might have been mingled with. the money of the hank, created no liability of the part of the-bank as trustee. (Syllabus by the court.)