Word: francqui
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...when Colonel Mobutu's troops finally got their hands on the fleeing Lumumba, he already was beyond remote Port Francqui, a steamboat stop on the Kasai River, 400 miles from Leopoldville. As angry crowds surrounded the Port Francqui police station shouting "Judas" and "Traitor," the soldiers wired their army boss to collect Lumumba immediately, or they would shoot him for treason. Sternly, Mobutu sent back word not to harm the prisoner and dispatched a plane to pick him up. "I cannot judge him. He must defend himself before the courts," explained Mobutu...
Died. Emile Francqui, 72, Belgium's richest man and No. 1 hard money expert; in Brussels. A burly, morose and solitary man. Francqui put aside his gifted money-making (banks, copper) whenever Belgium reached a financial crisis, twice devalued the Belgian franc, invented the foreign exchange medium of the belga (five Belgian francs). Europe called him "The Mystery Man," and "The Copper King of the Congo," where as a young captain he saved for Belgium from the British the territory in which one of the world's richest copper mines, Katanga, was later discovered...
Copper King and King. In a position to profit handsomely from devaluation, and known to have conferred with the young King last week, was Belgium's No. i financier, "Copper King" Emile Francqui...
...previous "Francqui devaluation" was in 1926. In that year the late King Albert was persuaded by Finance Minister Francqui that Belgium's currency, then sunk to about one-ninth of its pre-War value, should be officially "revalued" (i. e. devalued) and anchored for 25 years on gold. At the same time a new unit of currency, the belga, worth five Belgian francs, was adopted for dealings in foreign exchange, but in Belgium francs are still the currency...
Such deflationary measures did not help the private business of Francqui and Gutt but, as public-spirited statesmen, they had their reward when the belga bulged above the dollar on foreign exchange...