Damning insight into corporate culture sheds light

飞雪寒冰

He specialises in civil and white-collar criminal litigation. Among the thorny issues he has tackled are Chicago's healthcare system as a special counsel to the city and vendor and pension fraud at the city's housing authority.

His Lehman report was a mammoth task involving e-mails, reports, data sets and interviews. The internal Lehman correspondence alone amounted to 350bn pages of documentation spread across some 2,600 systems.

By using a sophisticated set of databases and search techniques, Mr Valukas and his team narrowed the focus but still examined some 34m pages of documents. Those efforts were supplemented by interviews with more than 250 people.

飞雪寒冰

Dick Fuld

Spent almost 40 years at Lehman Brothers and was chief executive from 1994 until the investment bank's collapse in 2008. His hard charging style has been credited for the broker- dealer's success in the 1990s and blamed for its eventual demise. Since the Lehman bankruptcy filing he has become a public bete noire, taking flak for everything from excessive pay to excessive hubris

Erin Callan

Joined Lehman Brothers in 1995. In December 2007 she became chief financial officer but was removed after only a few months following the bank's $2.8bn loss in the second quarter of 2008

Chris O'Meara

Joined Lehman in 1994 and served as both global controller and chief financial officer of investment banking before becoming chief financial officer from December 2004. In December 2007 Mr O'Meara became global head of risk management, an area that has come in for particular scrutiny in the wake of Lehman's disastrous investments and its bankruptcy filing

Ian Lowitt

Joined Lehman from McKinsey in 1994 and

in June 2008 replaced Erin Callan as chief financial officer, just in time for the company's bankruptcy filing on 15 September 2008