Councils rarely employ external experts to scrutinise housebuilders' figures contained in financial viability submissions.
"Libor is also intended to represent unsecured interbank borrowing costs for a range of maturities, but as this type of lending has severely declined since the financial crisis, submissions are more heavily reliant on judgment," Mr. Wheatley said.
On the basis of the submissions, financial firm Thomson Reuters calculates the Libor rate on behalf of the BBA, and it is released to the financial markets.
Last year, the British bank Barclays agreed to a $450 million settlement with authorities after some of its traders were found to have altered Libor rate submissions for financial gain.
But after being bombarded with submissions from financial firms, companies using the legal loophole and major accountancy companies, HMRC decided not to take the proposals forward last October.
This is so because the Commercial Registry has made a significant effort to facilitate the digital submission of financial statements by firms since the year 2000; (ii) both the Global Financial Crisis and the change in Accounting Rules implemented in 2008 (Plan General de Contabilidad 2007) make it difficult to interpret high growth rates in either productivity or employment around the year 2008.
Second, because of the time lag in the submission of financial statements by firms, the Orbis database is characterised by a typical time lag of 2 years (Ribeiro et al. 2010), which implies that coverage (in number of companies with complete records) for 2009 and 2010 is very poor, leaving 2008 as the best choice.
None of the authors have any financial support for this submission.
We also wish to acknowledge the PRE-EMPT (Pre-eclampsia-Eclampsia Monitoring, Prevention & Treatment) team for their financial support of this submission.
Diamond's deputy, Jerry del Missier, revealed to MPs that the bank's compliance department had been informed internally about the decision to reduce Libor submissions during the financial crisis.
