Lehman Bros administration costing £4m a week

The administration of Lehman Bros is racking up bills of £4m a week.

'The cost that is accruing is somewhere in the region of £4m a week,' PricewaterhouseCoopers lead adminstrator Tony Lomas told journalists. 'It's going to be an expensive process.'

Tony Lomas, Steve Pearson and Mike Jervis presented their proposals to a 1,000 strong audience of creditors at the Indig02 centre in Greenwich before facing the media.

Creditors were said to be 'resigned' to the fact that they could be in for a long wait before any money came back from the administration process.

Lehmans has a balance sheet of positions 'well north' of a trillion dollars,the administrators said , but efforts to get a breakdown of assets and liabilities have been hampered because they are still waiting on counterparties to work out their financial positions.

Lomas said that as accountants it was frustrating' to be dependent on the counterparties to submit information before they could push on with their work.

'It's extremely frustrating after 9 weeks that we're not further along than we are.'

There are $2.1bn of assets held by Lehman's sister companies which the administrators believe are owed to them, but Lomas and his team only have control over 0.5bn of these funds at the present time. Over $1bn is sitting with Lehman Bros AG in Germany.

The administrators will now meet the creditors committee in the next two weeks to have their fees agreed.