PwC annonce qu'il faudra 10 ans pour régler la faillite de Lehman

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business…-up-951388.html

  Citation

Lehman 'may take 10 years to wind up'

Administrators PwC must track down 'hundreds of thousands' of investment records at the failed bank

By Mark Leftly

Sunday, 5 October 2008

The Lehman Brothers administration will not be completed until 2018 at the earliest, according to the man in charge of selling and winding down the failed bank's European assets.

Tony Lomas, the chairman of business restructuring at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), said: "Based on industry experience, including cases like Polly Peck, Enron and [Robert] Maxwell, it could take a decade or more to close this administration, not least because it threatens to become bigger and more complex than any of these previous cases." Mr Lomas has been unravelling Enron's European operations for six years.

PwC has more than 150 people working in Lehman Brothers' European HQ in Canary Wharf, one-third of whom are from its corporate recovery team. There are also tax, property and human resources specialists.

PwC is also hiring former Lehman staff to help track down records of the firm's huge number of complicated investments. The way share deals are structured, whereby Lehman effectively acted as an intermediary, has left hundreds of firms' investments stranded. Olivant, the fund run by former Abbey chief Luqman Arnold, has a 2.78 per cent stake in UBS worth $1.4bn (£719m) that has gone missing.

Unravelling where all these investments have gone is one of the reasons the administration is "more complicated than Enron", said a source who has worked on the administration since Lehman went under last month. "There are hundreds of thousands of records to investigate," the source added. "This will take many years to sort out. The bulk of the asset recovery should be completed in the first year or two, and there will be interim distribution of proceeds paid to creditors."

PwC will look to recover around $1bn in financial assets that Lehman holds in more than 60 stock exchanges worldwide. It will start by looking at positions in London, Germany and France.

PwC has been frantically trying to save jobs to ensure that there are staff available to help advise administrators on key files. One reason for the quick sale of Lehman's investment banking and equities businesses in the UK and Europe to Japanese rival Nomura was to offer job security to 2,500 employees. PwC hopes the staff will stay, and administrators are negotiating with Nomura over the access they will get to these employees. The Nomura transaction is unlikely to complete formally for three to four weeks.

However, 750 Lehman staff in Europe were made redundant last week as part of what Mr Lomas described as a "necessary restructure".

PwC must call a meeting with creditors by the end of November under British law. Mr Lomas hopes to be able to offer a detailed position on relevant financial information by that point.

In March, PwC sold Enron's last major European asset, the Teesside Gas Transportation project, to Deutsche Bank for a reported £100m.