“Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. lawyers said the examiner who reviewed the firm’s collapse included misleading statements in his report about Barclays Plc’s purchase of the Lehman brokerage.
Examiner Anton Valukas’s March 11 report quoted a Lehman lawyer, Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP partner Thomas Roberts, as saying Barclays’s purchase of the brokerage unit was intended to be a “wash,” with neither gains nor losses for the buyer, according to letters filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York.
The law firm wrote that Valukas omitted statements that “the wash” was merely theoretical and there was no provision for a break-even deal in the sale agreement.
Lehman is seeking to recover $11 billion from Barclays, claiming the bank received a secret discount when it bought the brokerage. Barclays disputes that claim….”
I’ve thought for a while that the Valukas report was being hyped, and sure enough, Bloomberg, which has been a lot better than the other newspapers, has got some evidence to back that up now.
Here’s what I wrote in a comment at Deep Capture, just a few days ago, about the Valukas report and Bloomberg’s treatment of it (as compared to the uncritical praise at other news outlets):
Comment:
**************
The writer [the Bloomberg reporter] actually undermines [Michael] Lewis at every turn, calling his story loaded and one-sided and ending with this intriguing additional evidence that Lewis somehow doesn’t “get” it – a point I made in my post “Jim Rogers Tells Greeks To Go Bust” [http://mindbodypolitic.org/2010/03/09/rogers-tells-greeks-to-got-bust][Lila: Lewis, with Einhorn, has been using the Valukas report as an endorsement of his trader-activist-good-guy thesis]
Quote from end of the Bloomberg piece:
“What Lewis fails to note is that the day prior, Lewis himself had filed a column for Bloomberg News from Davos mocking Nouriel Roubini’s warning “that the risk of a crisis happening is rising.” Such forecasts of doom came from “people with no talent for risk-taking gather(ed) to imagine what actual risk takers might do,” Lewis wrote. The headline described them as “Wimps, Ninnies, Pointless Skeptics.”
Lila:
Like many people close up to the industry, Lewis gets all the details, but misses the overall narrative, maybe because he’s caught up in the activist mystique that traders like to project.
It’s a shame. Because “Liar’s Poker” is such a good book.
I’m afraid this new book and the movie by [Oliver] Stone, probably an upcoming book by [Bethany] McLean, will set the official narrative unless more people work on filling in the picture more accurately and less self-servingly.
Note also that Bloomberg’s heading on the Valukas report, unlike the rest of the MSM, emphasized Citi and JP Morgan’s help in pushing Lehman over.
*******************************
(End of comment)