Lehman Brothers Holdings couldn't value its plummeting holdings with any kind of certainty in the days before its broker-dealer business was sold to Barclays, the former head of Lehman's restructuring group told a bankruptcy court yesterday.

Mark Shapiro, who now heads Barclays' restructuring group, said a September 16 2008 asset purchase agreement estimating the value of Lehman's securities at $70bn (€55bn) was made at a time when Lehman was getting "blown out of positions" and therefore didn't have an accurate enough depiction of what they were worth to come up with an exact number.