Basta con asomarse a los titulares de los principales diarios para comprobar que los hechos que se reflejan en el voluminoso informe están llamados a tener importantes consecuencias, en el orden civil y, previsiblemente, en el criminal.
La primera noticia la encontré el viernes en la amplia crónica que bajo el título Examiner: Lehman Torpedoed Lehman ofrecía The Wall Street Journal y cuyos primeros párrafos ya expresaban el alcance de la revisión:
“A scathing report by a U.S. bankruptcy-court examiner investigating the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. blames senior executives and auditor Ernst & Young for serious lapses that led to the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
In the works for more than a year, and costing more than $30 million, the report by court-appointed examiner Anton Valukas paints the most complete picture yet of the free-wheeling culture inside the 158 year-old firm, whose chief executive Richard S. Fuld Jr. prided himself on his ability to manage market risk.
The document runs thousands of pages and contains fresh allegations. In particular, it alleges that Lehman executives manipulated its balance sheet, withheld information from the board, and inflated the value of toxic real estate assets”.
“While Mr. Fuld and other former top Lehman officials are already defendants in a number of civil lawsuits, the new discoveries by Mr. Valukas have taken even veteran observers by surprise. Chief among these was the revelation of a particularly aggressive accounting practice, known internally as Repo 105, that Mr. Valukas said helped the investment bank mask the true depths of its financial woes.
…
Mr. Valukas’s findings have stirred loud discussion among legal and accounting experts over the ways Lehman sought to improve its quarterly results months before it collapsed.
Over hundreds of pages, Mr. Valukas details the genesis of and the process behind Repo 105. Based on standard repurchase agreements — short-term loans commonly used by many firms for daily financing needs, in which borrowers temporarily exchange assets in return for cash up front — Lehman took a particularly aggressive accounting approach to these transactions.
Here, the investment bank used repos to temporarily park assets off its books to make its end-of-quarter debt levels look better than they did — while calling them sales instead of loans.
The accounting tactic, first used by Lehman in 2001, had one catch, according to Mr. Valukas: no American law firm would sign off on its use”.
Sobre la responsabilidad del auditor
“Lehman also had the backing of Ernst & Young, which certified the bank’s financial statements despite receiving warnings from a whistle-blower who said there were accounting improprieties. An Ernst & Young spokesman said on Thursday that the firm stood by its work for 2007, the last year it conducted an audit of Lehman’s financial results.But Lynn E. Turner, a former chief accountant for the S.E.C., accused Ernst & Young of abdicating its responsibility to the audit committee of Lehman’s board by not presenting the concerns”.
Vuelven los fantasmas del mal gobierno corporativo y el fiasco del papel de quienes tienen el deber legal de denunciar o supervisar conductas que, a la postre, revelan una capacidad destructiva absoluta. Parece que se vuelve al año 2000 y a la primera fase de grandes escándalos en la Corporate America. En esa línea se pronuncia el análisis de Peter Jennings en su columna publicada en The Deal Book del mismo NYT In Lehman’s Demise, Some Shades of Enron, que apunta certeramente al regreso a un escenario similar al que acompañó el hundimiento de Enron.
Otras valoraciones profundizan en el estudio del régimen legal de los bancos de inversión estadounidenses, sobre los que resultaba imposible aplicar medidas de rescate típicas de las crisis bancarias. Ésta es la tesis del Financial Times del fin de semana, que tras ofrecer una amplia cobertura sobre el informe del revisor y subrayar la sorpresa que ha causado (“Lehman file rocks Wall St”), incluye un editorial sobre las lecciones a extraer de este caso, en el que termina señalando:
“A barely-alive bank is an extremely dangerous thing. The temptation to fudge the figures or lie to prolong life becomes overwhelming. This is why regulators seize banks that are close to failure. But, as a broker-dealer, Lehman was not subject to such regulation: the SEC did not have the tools. In this situation, it is scarcely surprising that Lehman’s managers resorted to fudging. The report details how they used a repo transaction to artificially reduce the bank’s leverage, knowing the importance that investors placed on this figure. Lehman also misled investors about its access to liquid funds.
If there are lessons to be learned from Lehman, it is not simply that its management succumbed to temptation. The authorities were excessively sanguine about the existence of such a vast and undercapitalised organisation. None of this excuses the conduct of individuals or professional service firms that may have failed in their duties. Anyone who did wrong should be held to account. But the real lesson is that institutions with bank-like characteristics should all be treated like banks and be subject to proper oversight. Whatever the future regulatory world is to be, it should not contain loopholes for another Lehman to exploit”.
El problema fundamental no son tanto los cuantiosos daños patrimoniales sufridos por tantos y la exigencia de las correspondientes responsabilidades, sino las sensaciones generalizadas sobre la inutilidad de tantas medidas (administrativas, normativas, contables, etc.) llamadas a evitar situaciones como ésta. La gran víctima es la confianza en los mercados financieros y en el buen gobierno de las sociedades cotizadas.
Dentro de poco empezaremos a recibir noticias sobre los cambios normativos propuestos a partir del informe sobre la insolvencia de Lehman.
Madrid, 15 de marzo de 2010
