Great frauds in history: Tino De Angelis’ salad-oil scam

Anthony “Tino” De Angelis decided to corner the market in soybean oil and borrowed large amounts of money secured against the salad oil in his company’s storage tanks. Salad oil that turned out to be water.

Anthony (Tino) De Angelis
(Image credit: © Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)

Anthony “Tino” De Angelis was born in 1915 in the Bronx. After leaving school to work for a butcher in a meat market, he joined a large meat processor, the Adolf Gobel company. He worked his way up to become its president in 1949, but the company was soon forced into bankruptcy as a result of a scandal in 1952 that involved overcharging the US government $31,000 ($274,000 today) for substandard food. De Angelis quickly moved on to start another business, the Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining Corporation, which he set up in 1955.

What was the scam?

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Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

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