Frankfurt - Germany's central bank said on Tuesday that it had cleared the bad debts it incurred when the US financial services firm Lehman Brothers went bust six and a half years ago.
The rest of the bad debt of $2.15bn was settled in January with the remaining assets of Lehman Brothers and its German subsidiary, Lehman Brothers Bankhaus AG, the Bundesbank said.
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"At the end of a six-and-a-half-year liquidation and insolvency procedure, we received not only our initial demand of over €8.5bn, but we can also place a big fat zero on the accrued interest and business costs of €0.8bn," Bundesbank Chairperson Joachim Nagel said.
Lehman Brothers was the fourth-biggest US investment bank when it declared the largest bankruptcy in the world in September 2008. The filing is believed to have triggered the global financial crisis.
When Lehman Brothers became insolvent, Germany's central bank had monetary claims worth €8.5bn against the US bank as a member of the Eurosystem, the organisation comprising the European Central Bank and the eurozone's national central banks.
Lehman had deposited complex financial products, like asset-backed securities, against cash from central banks.
After the shockwave that hit the global economy in 2008, the market for such paper collapsed.
The Bundesbank did not immediately shed the paper at markdown prices but rather sold them on to professional institutional investors like hedge funds and financiers.