It’s incredible that institutions as large as Barclays still use Excel spreadsheets as a ledger for multi-billion dollar deals, and even more surprising are analysts who think that “hiding” columns with extremely private information is a good idea.
From theregister.co.uk
“Working to a tight deadline, a junior law associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP converted an Excel file into a PDF format document. The doc was to be posted on a bankruptcy court’s website before a midnight purchase offer deadline on 18 September, just four hours after Barclays sent the spreadsheet to the lawyers. The Excel file contained 1,000 rows of data and 24,000 cells.
Some of these details on various trading contracts were marked as hidden because they were not intended to form part of Barclays’ proposed deal. However, this “hidden” distinction was ignored during the reformatting process so that Barclays ended up offering to take on an additional 179 contracts as part of its bankruptcy buyout deal, Finextra reports.
The error was discovered on 1 October, after US Bankruptcy Judge James Peck approved the deal, prompting a legal motion (pdf) from Barclays to amend the deal, excluding the scores of contracts it states were mistakingly included in the agreement. The story was broken by legal tabloid Above The Law.”
Unbelievable!
