Leendert Pieter de Neufville
Leendert Pieter de Neufville (Amsterdam, March 8, 1729 – Rotterdam, July 28, 1811) was a Dutch merchant and banker trading in silk, linen, and grain.
It is likely that the army's outsourcing of handling bills of exchange in commercial payment boosted his business in a sophisticated form of letters of credit, acceptance loans.
In Spring 1763 De Neufville was party to a major speculative grain deal with the Berlin merchant banker Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky.
[4] De Neufville suspended payment on 3 August 1763; his list of creditors included over 100 bill counterparties, the great majority of those residing in cities outside of the Dutch Republic.
The Neufville Bros. traded in almost everything: silver (formally for 82,429 guilders), almonds, sugar, Meissen porcelain, and gum were the most important products.
Also Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, an army contractor, placed orders with De Neufville.
At the same time inflation became a widespread phenomenon in northern Europe, as many German states and other countries like Sweden financed the war by debasing their currencies.
[18][19] Already in January De Neufville started to import and melt debased coins from Mecklenburg, Plön and Zerbst, expecting to sell the refined silver at a high price to Prussian merchants.
[22] In May 1762 De Neufville bought an estate outside Heemstede; he experimented with silver refining, but was not very successful, according to Johann Heinrich Müntz.
According to Jan Jacob Mauricius, the Dutch resident in Hamburg, the merchant/bankers Schimmelmann and Stenglin were interested in restarting the company with help from De Neufville.
[25] On 19/20 April Gotzkowsky bought a huge amount of grains (oats) through the intermediation of the Russian envoy Vladimir Sergeevich Dolgorukov (1717 - 1803).
Because of a grain shortage and famine in Prussia, the transaction could have been profitable for Gotzkowsky and De Neufville, the latter one secretly collaborating with two partners Stein and Leveaux, all collectors of art.
On 18 July the Russian senate refused this offer and insisted on being paid promptly; she demanded payment in Dutch guilders, and not in debased Saxon coins.
[40] In May 1763 one Amsterdam observer remarked: "The crude bars of silver that are being smelted here from the money arriving in great quantities from the north of Germany, cannot be sold and are everywhere being borrowed against; these are also being discounted by 7 percent.
"[41] From 1 June the market for discounted bills collapsed when Frederick demonetized his debased wartime coinage before new money was issued.
[50] On June 28, 1763, Carl Leveaux, a Berlin banker, drew seven bills on De Neufville for an amount of 12,900 guilders and 5,160 Thaler, to be paid on cash.
A snapshot of De Neufville's balance sheet at the end of June shows all the symptoms of a leveraged trader in distress.
He managed a silkworks, a jewelry business in Leipzig with J.R. Streckfuss, a porcelain factory (now KPM) that was not running at his satisfactory, all at the same time.
By the end of July 1763, both Gotzkowsky and De Neufville had difficulty finding the needed money to settle their obligations and feared they would go bankrupt.
[61]The strain on liquidity was most keenly felt by speculators like De Neufville and Arend Joseph & Co; the latter failed on 28 July 1763, and fled, after three respite days, to Culemborg, a hiding place for bankrupts.
[66] On 2 August the bankers in Amsterdam refused to lend De Neufville the money (700,000 guilders) to pay his obligations to Gotzkowsky.
(The banking houses of Hope & Co, Clifford, Warin and Muilman tried to form a syndicate, but Andries Pels & Zoonen refused to participate.)
[78] The Bank of Amsterdam and the Stadsbank van Lening were open until two o'clock that night to accept gold and silver, which had never happened before.
On Sunday, August 21, Frederick the Great wrote to both the Amsterdam city council and the States General of the Netherlands with the request to prop up the De Neufville Bros.[80] He proposed to exclude the chamber of bankruptcies and convene a special committee.
On 23 August De Neufville authorized Jean Conrad Sollicoffre, a Swiss banker in The Hague, to "organize" his bookkeeping.
Landgravine Caroline Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt and her husband Margrave Charles Frederick, Grand Duke of Baden visited De Neufville on July 1.
On 4 July 1763 he bought 15 paintings in The Hague, including a Gerard Dou, Frans Hals, Paulus Potter, Philips Wouwerman and Jan van Huysum, from the collection of Willem Lornier, for the price of 9,115 guilders.
[89] On 29 October, the directors of the bankrupt chamber announced that they wanted to auction the painting collection of De Neufville on 14 December 1763.
Between 1787 and 1800 De Neufville was fairly active in Delft and the surrounding area in buying real estate; no more bills of exchange.
[92] Another auction of paintings was held in 1804; De Neufville had a special interest for the German painter Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich.
