On Monday, during the House Oversight Committee grilling of former Lehman Chairman and CEO Richard Fuld, Chairman Henry Waxman made note of Fuld’s impressive personal art collection. But it was the extensive collection owned by the company that popped up in this amended sales agreement filed in an 8K yesterday.

In the agreement between Barclays and Lehman from Sept. 22, Barclays was given the right to keep the art at Lehman’s headquarters at 745 Seventh Ave. in place for a year. During that time, Barclays will have the opportunity to purchase the art for the appraised value. If they don’t want it, it returns back to Lehman, where presumably it would be put up for auction as part of the bankruptcy.

In yesterday’s agreement, Bain Capital, which agreed to buy Neuberger Berman for $2.15 billion, got a similar deal: they get to keep the artwork located at 605 Third Ave. for a year (but not the art at 399 Park Ave.). In both agreements, what’s interesting (particularly to art aficionados) is that the collection can be broken up, so that both Barclays and Bain can pick and choose the pieces they want.

According to this Bloomberg story, the collection has over 3,500 pieces by a wide variety of well-known artists. The Neuberger Berman collection has another 900 pieces.

Image source: Tampa Museum of Art

This entry was posted Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 11:06 am written by Michelle Leder and is filed under Buried treasure, market meltdown with the following tags: 8Ks, perks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.