Some Lehman creditors "will lose money"

Representatives for the company informed close to 1,000 creditors of the current state of the firm in a meeting at the Indigo2 venue in North Greenwich.

Joint administrator Tony Lomas said: "The prospect is that creditors will lose money. There will not be a 100 per cent recovery here.
"It might be reasonable to assume that a $17billion cushion is not enough and there will be a shortfall.
"The question is how big the shortfall is going to be and we won't know that for a reasonably significant period of time."

Lehman Brothers International (Europe) has around $1billion worth of positions, with half a trillion of assets and half a trillion of liabilities. At the time of the bank's bankruptcy, there were 140,000 failed trades.

In the last nine weeks, administrators have been attempting to recover money held by third parties across the world, including $1billion currently locked in German sister company Bankhaus AG by liquidators.

Mr Lomas acknowledged the process could take two to three years to complete, and revealed "frustration" at the speed in which other parties were providing important information on potential assets and liabilities.

He claimed the process could well be "ten times more complicated" than the disposal of Enron, the multinational energy company which collapsed in 2001.

He said: "There are third parties out there with custody of LBIE assets and they haven't confirmed whether they're there, whether they're ours and whether they're going to give them back.
"Until they do that, we can't move forward. It's frustrating because we're doing this using a team of people that we're valiantly keeping together and getting remotivated in a fragile environment.
"They're working in a routine environment, and they still can't confirm their position."

A total of 2,500 employees were transferred to Nomura after the Japanese bank took control of some European elements the following month. There have been 500 resignations and 1,000 redundancies, and 1,100 employees are working with PricewaterhouseCoopers to resolve issues with the business.

While the monthly payroll for the company has dropped from $70million to $8million, administrator costs accrued have built up to around £4million a week.

Mr Lomas said: "It's going to be an expensive process. But we're extremely alive to the need for efficiency in the way we go about the task."