 Shortly thereafter, in December 1939, Leir fled to New York City, where he was immediately granted a US passport and founded the "Continental Ore Company".During the decades that followed, Leir forged a close relationship between the royal court of Luxembourg and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who traced his ancestry to Luxembourg through his mother Sara Delano.Over the decades following World War II, Leir built upon these personal, bi-national relationships to attract several major American corporations to Luxembourg, among them Goodyear, DuPont, Monsanto Company, Wells Fargo and Bank of America.