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Despite the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld can still negotiate a deal. For example: taking home $20 million on $13.5 million worth of sold art.

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What:

Arshile Gorky ''Study For Agony 1'' Graphite, crayong and ink wash on paper 22 x 30 inches Executed in 1946-1947

Where:

Christie's, New York Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale Nov. 12, 2008

How Much:

Pre-Auction Estimate: $2.2 - $2.8 million Final Selling Price: $2,210,500

Don't feel too bad for Richard Fuld, CEO--at least until the end of this year--of once-mighty Lehman Brothers. Despite the demise of his fabled Wall Street firm, Fuld still knows how to negotiate a good deal.

Take, for example, the sale earlier this month at Christie's of 16 works of art owned by Fuld and his wife, Kathy. The collection was expected to sell for between $15 and $20 million. Instead, it barely pulled in $13.5 million. However, the Fulds still made $20 million on the sale.

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Kathy Fuld, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, assembled the collection over the past 20 years and focused on buying drawings from the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. She chose well and presumably had expert advice from MOMA curators.

But selling the group of drawings proved challenging--not only because the art markets has hit a major bump amid the economic gloom that, in some ways, was fueled by the failure of her husbands giant Wall Street firm--but also because Abstract Expressionist drawings are not an easy commodity to trade.

Drawings from this time period are esoteric and intellectually demanding. They require a connoisseur's eye. Most everyone understands works by a pop artist like Andy Warhol, but not everyone gets Arshile Gorky.

Still, the Gorky drawing was one of the few fiscal highlights of the works sold by the Fulds. Bought for $370,000 in 1996, the work sold comfortably within its estimate range for just over $2.2 million. The drawing, called ''Agony I,'' was made between 1946 and 1947 and is a study for a painting owned by MOMA.

At this period of his life, Gorky was a tortured soul, reeling from a fire that destroyed his studio and he was coping with cancer. His grief overwhelmed him one year later--he took his own life at the age of 44.

LONDON

Administrators of the European arm of failed investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. said Friday that untangling its financial dealings will be a much bigger -- and far lengthier -- task than dealing with the fallout of the collapse of energy company Enron Corp.

After meeting with more than 1,000 creditors of Lehman Brothers International (Europe), or LBIE, in London, administrators from accountancy firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers said that they had recovered around just $5 billion of a potential $550 billion of obligations to creditors on the bank's balance sheet.

The PWC team is trying to unravel a complex web of tens of thousands of trades that amount to more than $1 trillion and expressed disappointment that two months into the job they are further behind than planned because they have yet to receive confirmation about LBIE funds held by third parties.

"In scale, it is going to be 10 times as big and as complicated," PWC administrator Tony Lomas told journalists, referring to the Enron case and noting that he and several of his associates were still working on those files some seven years down the road.

"I don't see this is going to be any quicker or any easier than that," he added.

Lomas said it was far too early to tell how much creditors would get once the assets and liabilites are unwound among third parties and other Lehman businesses around the world.

"The balance sheet position will be north of $1 trillion and we've got a long way to go before knowing what the position is for creditors and, if there is a shortfall, just how short it will be," he said.

Billions of dollars in bad debt forced Lehman Brothers, once the fourth-largest investment bank in the U.S., to file for bankruptcy in September amid the world's worst financial crisis in decades.

The bank's collapse shocked many who thought the U.S. Treasury would step in to keep it afloat. Uncertainty over the consequences of the failure -- with thousands of counterparties on Lehmans' complex derivative contracts left potentially exposed -- dealt a severe shock to the financial system.

PWC already has succeeded in negotiating a deal with Japanese brokerage Nomura Holdings Inc. for it to buy Lehman's European and Middle Eastern equities and investment banking operations.

PWC declined to specify how many creditors there are to the European business, but said that details of Friday's meeting were sent out to around 11,500 individuals and businesses. Around 100 creditors have applied for "hardship status" because of their own financial positions, which, if granted, would expedite their claims.

Around 1,000 European workers lost their jobs as a result of the collapse and another 500 resigned.

Around 2,500 staff, mostly at the European arm's London headquarters in the Canary Wharf financial district, were transferred to Nomura and another 1,100 are now on the books of PWC.

Pearson said that staffing costs are now running at $8 million a week, while fees to engage PWC are racking up some 4 million pounds ($6 million) a week.

Nomura is also purchasing the bank's franchise in the Asia Pacific region, including Japan and Australia.

Barclays PLC, which walked away from a deal to buy the entire company before the collapse, has bought Lehman's North American investment banking and capital markets businesses as well as its New York headquarters.

Deutsche Bank AG said this week that it has sued the bank to recover $72.5 million it says was accidentally transferred to Lehman after it had filed for bankruptcy.

PWC associate Steven Pearson said Friday that Lehman Brothers Bankhaus AG in Germany, which is in moratorium and likely to be given insolvency protection, has $1 billion in deposits owned by LBIE.

Lehman's liquidation is the biggest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history. It filed with assets of $639 billion and debt of $613 billion.