Belgium’s Citibank is the latest firm to be hit by the fallout from the collapse of Lehman Brothers. More than a thousand people who invested in the US group through Citibank now stand to lose their savings.

Rita Huysmans, bar and restaurant owner, is one of them. She has some 40,000 euros tied up and is trying to team up with other investors to launch a class action against Citibank, because she says she has been cheated.

“I thought that my money was in a Citibank deposit account, and they told me that they should have used those money to invest on the BEL 20. As I knew that BEL 20 consisted of the 20 most important Belgian listed companies I thought that nothing should go wrong with them. Later I discovered that my money had been exchanged into dollars and that it was not under the protection of the Belgian state. At the moment. I don’t know whether I’ll get my money back or if I’ve lost it. Citibank won’t give me any guarantee, they told me that this is the responsibility of Lehman Brothers,” said Ms Huysmans.

Some people are ready to take legal action because they claim that Citibank did not provide them with essential information about their investments.

They are being backed by Hans Bonte, a Flemish socialist member of the Belgian federal parliament, who has spent the last year criticizing Citibank. “Citibank has continued to sell Lehman Brothers products after it itself announced that there were existential problems in their bank, that there were great losses, 2 billion dollars losses where the rates tumbled down each quarter so… still Citibank continued to commercialise products and they do it in a way that people, that the consumers don’t really know that it’s a risky product,” he says.

Hans Bonte now wants the courts to condemn Citibank and force it to cover investors losses. He says the firm was wrong to promise 100 percent guarantees without making it clear who would be the guarantor. But Citibank claim that simply is not true. “We base our products and our decisions to offer financial solutions based on official ratings from organisations like Standards & Poor’s, not on rumours. Lehman had a positive rating. Until the last day I have seen headlines where Lehman Brothers was clearly mentioned as a guarantor, so I have no reason to doubt that the information was passed,” claims Lars Seynaeve, Citibank’s Public Affairs officer.

It is unclear how much Citibank was exposed to the collapse of Lehman Brothers but it is thought to be in the region of tens of millions of euros.

Copyright © 2012 euronews