| Description | (a) Vickers; (b) Whitehall Securities. Negotiations for the sale of Vickers's Spanish subsidiary completed May 1943. Sale realised the peseta equivalent of £600,000. HM Government (HMG) used the pesetas partly for goods for the Belgian Red Cross and partly for general purposes (folio 129), and paid Vickers the sterling. Similar negotiations for the sale of Whitehall Securities' hydro-electric undertaking in Spain completed Sep 1942: Spanish buyers paid £475,000; half was settled through the Anglo-Spanish Clearing, and half received by HMG in free pesetas against sterling paid to the sellers. |