Six months ago, Lehman Brothers’ European administrators were struggling to keep the lights on and find the cash to cover the payroll. Now PwC, which leads the operation, has racked up fees of more than £77m and is sitting on a cash pile of almost $6bn (£4bn) in Lehman Europe’s “house” account. But it warns that the end is still nowhere in sight.

When Lehman informed its subsidiaries it would no longer support them on September 15, it triggered a race to file for bankruptcy by those units and led to a stress-testing of national bankruptcy laws and processes that had never been envisaged.