US and UK estate administrators of Lehman differ over bankruptcy protocol

On Tuesday Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc's is asking U.S. estate administrators to approve a framework for coordinating bankruptcy proceedings for the bank's subsidiaries worldwide, putting them at odds with its administrators in the UK, the Wall Street Journal reported.

According to the Journal Lehman's UK estate administrator PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), who represents the bank's main European arm, maintains the estate is governed by local rules and the interests of its own creditors.

Tony Lomas, a PwC partner said that a global protocol is "unnecessary, insufficiently tailored and unacceptably burdensome.”

Lehman's London-based estate held about a third of the firm's estimated $630 billion in assets before it filed for bankruptcy in September 2008. The estate holds data essential to insolvency proceedings among other smaller European subsidiaries.