Barclays Excel Spreadsheet Horror

It’s just emerging that Barclays has been narrowly saved from a massive screw up that occured while they were preparing to buy Lehman’s Brothers assets. A number of blog rumours can be traced back to American online legal tabloid Above the Law, which reports that 179 dodgy Lehman’s contracts were almost accidentally purchased by Barclays in September, because of an Excel spreadsheet reformatting error:

“The nightmare started for a first-year Cleary Gottlieb associate on the night of September 18th. The associate was called in for some extra muscle on the Barclays acquisition of Lehman assets. At the request of a second-year associate, the first-year reformatted an Excel spreadsheet of critical contracts to be assumed and assigned in bankruptcy on the closing date of the Lehman/Barclays sale. Predictably, this work was done long after normal business hours, just after 11:30 p.m…

…The problem was that the list contained 179 contracts that should not have been included. The Lehman/Barclays sale closed on September 22nd, with the over inclusive list of contracts….

…The mistake was caught by Barclays or Cleary on October 1st.

…According to the various affidavits (posted below) the Cleary first-year did not notice that the 179 contracts were marked as “hidden” in Excel, and certainly didn’t notice that those entries became “un-hidden” when he globally reformatted the document.”

On October 10th the US Bankrupcy Court accepted Barclays motion to cancel these contracts. Had they not… who knows, but Barclays in their motion (which you can download from Above The Law) said that the 179 accidentally included contracts were ones they:

“had not designated as Closing Date Contracts, but had in fact expressly declined to designate as such.”

Knowing Lehman’s, they could have cost Barclays anything…

Posted by Daniel Stacey in Hot Money | October 16, 2008 6:55PM |