Administrators of Lehman Brothers’ European business have asked for the return of more than $8 billion that was transferred to the failed investment bank’s U.S. company before its bankruptcy.
The request, made in a letter sent by PricewaterhouseCoopers on Wednesday, is likely to be well received by Lehman’s 4,500 staff in London, many of whom have been angry that the bank’s U.K. operations had no cash when their parent company failed last Sunday night.
The fact that $8 billion had been transferred to New York in the days leading to Lehman’s collapse is not considered suspicious at this poing, although the auditors claim that they are not ruling anything out.
The written request may be followed up with legal action to reclaim the funds. It is too early to establish whether the money that was transferred from London to New York could even be claimed back at this point.
The funds were not necessarily sent to New York as a single sum, but more likely as an accumulation of funds over the bank’s last several days of solvency.