The Very Last of Lehman Brothers

The bank whose collapse marked the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis is only mostly dead. Meet the people attending to its final remains

- Lucca de Paoli and Jeremy Hill

DARYL RATTIGAN ARRIVED AT LEHMAN BROTHERS 18 years ago for a three-month assignment from his law firm. Eventually, the bank gave him a full-time job at its real estate finance arm in London.

Then the bank suddenly collapsed.

And he’s still there, almost 14 years later.

It turns out that when global financial institutions die, it can take a while. These deaths require caretakers. The spirit of a bank, even in life, is debt, and debts don’t settle easily into a grave. Most of the assets banks own are the debts of others: the mortgages, commercial loans, and IOUs payable to the bank. On the other side, of course, banks owe money—to their bond- and note-holders, counter-parties in financial trades, and a long list of other creditors. Banks such as Lehman topple over when they suddenly can’t wring enough cash from their assets to meet their liabilities.

But even after the funeral, all the debts on both sides of the ledger are still there, and professionals are needed to sort out who has to pay up and who should be paid—professionals such as Rattigan, who’s spent years working to eke out value from property assets the bank held when it went under. On the morning of Sept. 15, 2008, in the hours after his employer filed for bankruptcy, Rattigan had no idea if he still had a job. He came into the office in London’s Canary Wharf, unsure of whether the doors would even be unlocked, to at least get his Rolodex. “In the back of your mind, you are also aware that there’s sometimes scope for people to be retained and help” with the cleanup, Rattigan says. “But if I was going to be retained, I had to get back in there and get my face shown.”