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Report criticises Lehman Brothers

Summary

12 March 2010

A court-appointed investigator says the American investment bank, Lehman Brothers, used "accounting gimmicks", and had been insolvent for weeks before it filed for bankruptcy in September 2008.

Reporter:

Nick Cosgrove

Report

The collapse of Lehman Brothers was the biggest bankruptcy in US history and sparked the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. This report, which runs to two thousand, two hundred pages, has found that the leadership of Lehmans, including the Chief Executive, Dick Fuld, deliberately used financial trickery going back to 2001, to make the bank appear healthier than it really was.

In 2008 alone this mechanism enabled Lehmans to remove 50 billion dollars from its balance sheet, allowing it to maintain a decent credit rating and investor confidence. 

The report says that Lehman was unable to get an American law firm to sign off these transactions, and instead moved the work to its London office, with the blessing of a leading city law firm. The bank's auditors also come in for criticism. Ernst and Young is accused of failing to question and challenge improper or inadequate disclosures in the bank's results.

Nick Cosgrove, BBC News