Lehman Renews Bid to Query JPMorgan Trader Iksil

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. renewed its bid to draw Bruno Iksil, known as the “London Whale” trader, into an $8.6 billion fight with JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)

The defunct investment bank filed a revised request yesterday to a federal judge in Manhattan, seeking permission to ask for international judicial assistance to force Iksil, a French national, to answer questions, as he is unwilling to do so.

Among the supporting documents for its request, Lehman attached e-mails from JPMorgan’s collateral operations group about a dispute over three derivatives trades in 2008, shortly before Lehman collapsed in bankruptcy. Two of the transactions listed Luis Buraya as the trader, together with Iksil.

Other documents in the case show Iksil saying, when asked about the trades, “I do not know. This is not me,” before referring Lehman to Buraya.

JPMorgan, a key lender to Lehman during the 2008 credit crisis, said this week the derivatives margin that Lehman currently wanted to query Iksil about -- which was resolved at the time by returning disputed margin to Lehman -- wasn’t related to the collateral at issue in the lawsuit.

Lehman’s inquiry concerned fewer than a dozen derivatives trades, out of 70,000 such trades between the bank and its client, and would add nothing to the “millions of pages of documents and eighty depositions of current and former JPMorgan personnel” obtained by Lehman in the past two years, JPMorgan said in filings in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.

To contact the reporter on this story: Linda Sandler in New York at lsandler@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Farr at sfarr@bloomberg.net