LCH.Clearnet Ltd - too embarrased to reveal their transactions for 2010?

On the 23rd of December, I asked what would the level  LCH.Clearnet Ltds financial transactions be for 2010. The numbers were missing from the BIS provisional report published in September. Given that the company was responsible for clearing an unbelievable £862.5 trillion  in 2008, it would be particularly interesting to know how well they were doing in 2010, especially as they had a really rough year in 2009 - only managing to clock up £588.8 trillion.

Well, the final BIS came out on the 4th of January. You can download the entire 554 page report as a pdf file here.  You can also download Comparative tables in excel format here, and Country tables in excel format here. I immediately rushed to see the final numbers for LCH.Clearnet , which are shown in Table 21 on page 392 of the report. Guess what? The numbers for 2010 are still "nav" - not available!

What's this? LCH.Clearnet is not being upfront about what it's doing? Intringuingly, table 20, which gives the numbers of transactions, appears to indicate that LCH.Clearnet only did 279 million trades, only 10% of the number for 2008.

I simply don't believe them. We're talking about a company that specialises in very high volume transactions, and that offers free transactions for traders managing to to more than 150 000 transactions a month. You cannot be serious, man!

My conclusion is that the are simply too embarrassed to reveal the true scale of what is being done in the City. It was already the case that the London Stock Exchange decided that they didn't need to bother providing the data to B.I.S. - the last figures were in 2005.

It looks to me that LCH.Clearnet has decided that life would be so much easier if they simply didn't bother to provide the numbers. After all, if they did, people would be able to work out how much a Financial Transaction Tax of 0.05% would raise for the UK taxpayer.