Administration work on bank's European business thought to have earned PwC highest fees from any UK corporate failure
Accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers have earned £322m in fees from the collapse of Lehman Brothers' European arm, a sum thought to be the largest ever earned from any single UK corporate failure.
The fees are disclosed in a progress report covering the last six months of 2010.
The wind-down of the European arm of the investment bank is still keeping 500 bankers employed, on top of the accountants from PwC working on the administration.
The fees paid exceed the $361m (£221m) earned by Deloitte for its role as liquidator of BCCI. The BCCI fees were earned over 18 years, while the Lehman appointment dates back two-and-a-half years.
Unravelling Lehman Brothers' affairs has proved more complicated than PwC expected, and as a result it plans to only pay a dividend to unsecured creditors "during 2012", the report says. It had previously hoped to make a first payout by February of this year.
The total return to unsecured creditors could be anything from just under 50p in the pound to as much as 75p, according to the latest figures. Funds available to unsecured creditors could be anything from £7.5bn to £10bn, while the total sum owed to creditors could vary from £13.3bn to £15.7bn.
It is not clear how much Lehman owes its 6,000 creditors because there are differences of valuation, among other considerations.
The UK fees paid to PwC do not include fees paid for the legal work on Lehman's European arm, which also run into hundreds of millions of pounds, nor the fees charged for the bankruptcy proceedings in the US by American restructuring firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M).
Latest SEC filings show A&M has earned $412m from the collapse, as part of a total of $1.2bn of fees charged by various parties in the course of the bankruptcy.
The total fees are estimated to top $2bn worldwide, comfortably exceeding fees charged as part of Enron's bankruptcy, which ran to $750m.
PwC argues that the European fees are low relative to the size of the task of unravelling a balance sheet worth more than £1tn. It says its fees amount to less than 1% of the value of the assets dealt with.
It is now wrestling with 10 different issues which are each worth more than £1bn to Lehmans.
In one case it is trying to recover securities, cash and client money from an unnamed financial institution. In a second it needs to agree the state of financial trading positions with another unnamed organisation.
Tony Lomas, one of the administrators at PwC, has said it could be 20 years before the administration is concluded. The investment bank collapsed in September 2008.