FIDELITY TRUST AND SAFETY VAULT COMPANY
v.
LOUISVILLE; SAME V. STONE, AUDITOR; LOUISVILLE TRUST COMPANY V. LOUISVILLE; SAME V. STONE, AUDITOR
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Two trust companies challenged a city auditor's tax assessments, arguing they were entitled to the same favorable tax treatment previously granted to the Louisville Banking Company under the Hewitt Act. The Supreme Court affirmed the lower court's decrees, holding that the city officials lacked authority to bind the trust companies to a tax agreement and that the Hewitt Act did not create an irrevocable contract guaranteeing tax exemptions for trust companies chartered or whose charters were extended after 1856.
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Mr. Justice Peckham,
after making the above statement, delivered the opinion of the court.
It is unnecessary to determine whether the distinction between the business of a bank and that of a trust company was such as to cause it to be illegal to have agreed that the liability of the trust companies to taxation contrary to the Hewitt Act should abide the result of the controversy as to the Louisville Banking Company, since we have just decided in Samuel H. Stone, Auditor, et al., v. Bank of Commerce, No. 362, ante, 412, that, irrespective of any distinction which might exist between the business of a bank eo nomine and that of a trust company, the commissioners of the. sinking fund and the city attorney were without power to have made the agreement upon which the complainants relied in order to establish that they were priviés to the decision in favor of the Louisville-Banking Company. The plea of the thing adjudged depending upon the existence of privity being thus disposed of, there remains only to consider the alleged existence of an irrevocable contract arising from the Hewitt Act. That no such contract arose from that act as to. corporations chartered after 1856, or whose charters were extended subsequent to that year, was decided in Citizens' Savings Bank of Owensboro v. Owensboro, 173 U. S. 636. Indeed, the opinion in that case and the opinion announced in Stone v. Bank of Commerce, supra, are decisive against the appellants, who were complainants below, as to every issue which arises for decision on these records, and the decrees below rendered are therefore
Affirmed.