Clients of Lehman Brothers’ European operations face further delay in recovering up to $9bn of assets after an English judge decided he could not approve a scheme that would have helped expedite the winding-up of the collapsed bank’s complicated operations.

PwC, administrator of the defunct bank’s main European operations, had proposed a scheme of arrangement that would have divided more than 1,000 clients into three classes and allowed the administrators to deal with claims by class rather than individually.