THE rescue vehicle set up to dispose of assets belonging to French hank Credit Lyonnais (CL) has alleged in an internal newsletter that the French state owned hank was the target of massive fraud before 1993.
Credit Lyonnais has sought bids for its 54 per cent stake in the Irish financial services company Woodchester Investments.
"The further the Consortium de Realisation (CDR) teams advance, thanks to their audits ... one thing becomes clear - the existence of an organised fraud until 1993," the state backed holding company CDR alleged in the document.
The CDR was set up in 1995 to sell off Credit Lyonnais' assets under a state rescue of the bank.
The CDR said the alleged fraud involved seven former units of Credit Lyonnais - including Altus Finance, SDBO, SAGA and Colbert - not the parent bank - and that the cost of this financial apocalypse was above figures recently mentioned.
The CDR told a parliamentary commission in March it expected the cost of its sell off operation to total 102 billion francs (£11.8 billion) over a number of years to 2014 but that did not include carrying costs of the assets, expected to be around 30 billion francs.
It said the fraud amounted to a veritable looting, often concealed by false balance sheets," and that the former management was too obliging.
Credit Lyonnais almost collapsed in the early 1990s after an ill fated expansion binge which briefly made it the biggest bank outside Japan.
The bank, which has received massive state handouts, could be privatised as early as this year.
The strongly worded document, dated May, 1997, was addressed to "all those who work for the successful completion of (CDR's) mission" and was intended to boost staff morale.
