More than 2,000 jobs at Lehman Brothers in London appeared to have been saved last night after Nomura, the Japanese bank, paid a nominal $2 for parts of the business.

While there was jubilation for staff in the acquired divisions - equities and investment banking - the administrators gave warning of delays in selling the fund management assets. Nomura said that it expected to retain a significant proportion of the 2,500 staff in equities and investment banking but that it was not buying any of the trading assets or liabilities. Nor will it come to the rescue of the staff pension fund, whose deficit, on a conservative “buyout” basis, was put at £150 million yesterday by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the administrator.

Sadeq Sayeed, an adviser to the Nomura board and the architect of the deal, said: “We'd been looking at opportunities outside Japan for quite some time. It [Lehman] was extraordinarily appetising.” The Japanese originally offered £1 but the administrator asked to be paid in dollars. This week Nomura paid a reported $230 million (£124 million) for Lehman's Asian businesses.

Nomura is not expected to meet guaranteed bonuses or any accrued bonuses of Lehman staff. “We are starting from scratch,” Mr Sayeed said. He denied that the stars at Lehman were being locked in with juicy contracts: “We're convinced we'll retain the best of them. Some will leave. That's the market.”

No decisions had been made on where the business will be located, nor how it will be integrated with Nomura's existing London operations, which employ 1,500 people. Mr Sayeed said there was little overlap between the two businesses. “This is not an opportunistic, ‘this-is-cheap' transaction. This is a strategic acquisition,” he said.

Lehman was put into administration in Britain and Chapter 11 bankruptucty in the United States ten days ago after the US authorities decided against underwriting a rescue deal. About 4,500 jobs in the UK were put on the line.

After the decision by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to reshape themselves as commercial banks, the Lehman deals make Nomura the biggest independent investment bank in the world by some measures.

Dan Schwarzmann, a partner at PwC, said that the administrator had received approaches for the asset management division, but that it would take longer to sell than he had hoped. He suggested that the complexities involved with transferring assets and renewing fund management deals with customers would slow down the sale.

Mr Schwarzmann said that he was still confident that the business could be disposed of, but that the bank's fixed income division, which was a strong player in its field and employs about 600 staff, was of prime importance. He described the deal with Nomura as “unprecedented”, with only seven or eight PwC staff responsible for drawing it together over the past nine days.

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