ONE Friday lunchtime in February 1995 Alan Bloom, an insolvency specialist at Ernst & Young, received a telephone call. Was he free to attend a meeting at Barings, the merchant bank? It was a matter of some urgency.

Bloom assumed that Barings had run into trouble with a loan. “It was only when we got there that we understood that the problem was Barings itself.”

The bank had uncovered a multi-million pound black hole in its Singapore trading operation. On Sunday evening, after a frantic weekend trying to orchestrate a rescue, Peter Baring, the bank’s chairman, summoned Bloom and his colleagues. Ashen-faced, he announced that Barings was filing to be placed in administration.

“It was one of the most dramatic meetings I’ve ever been to,” recalls Bloom, who went on to become administrator of Railtrack.

“Peter Baring came in and said: ‘Our last option has just gone away. We’re going to have to file.’ It was a very sombre moment. This was a dynasty. This was the end of an era.”

It was the trigger for one of the most complex insolvency assignments undertaken in the UK. Unless a buyer could be found within days, key traders and dealmakers at Barings would be headhunted and the operation would implode.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the dramatic events that saw Britain’s oldest merchant bank wiped out by Nick Leeson’s rogue trading. For Bloom, Barings remains a case of unrivalled intensity. Within two weeks the firm had been sold, largely intact, to ING, the Dutch bank, for a token one pound.

Events unfolded at lightning speed. When Mr Baring made his pronouncement, the administrators had only hours to formalise their appointment.

Midnight marked the opening of trading in Singapore and Tokyo. Rumours were circulating that a bank had failed, and prompt action was needed to prevent a market meltdown.

A meeting room at Barings was turned into a court to allow representations to be heard. The judge, Lord Justice Scott, later author of the 1996 Scott Report on arms sales to Iraq, approved the appointment at 10.30pm on Sunday February 26, 1995.

Bloom and his team were to receive 140 expressions of interest in Barings or its divisions. Rivals were keen to pick off “star” elements such as the corporate finance team.

By Monday morning E&Y had more than 70 people on the project. There were many more from Slaughter and May, the law firm.

Bloom was joint administrator alongside Maggie Mills and Nigel Hamilton. Mills took responsibility for Barings’s day-to-day operations, while Bloom sounded out potential buyers.

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