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By Sarah Left, 10 April 2000 00:10

NEWS The closure of the London Stock Exchange (LSE) last Wednesday was designed to dodge the fallout from unstable tech stocks, according to one of the guests on Behind the Headlines, Silicon.com's provocative weekly show. The crash called a halt to London trading until 3:45pm GMT, the longest closure in the Exchange's history. Thomas Power, chief knowledge officer at Ecademy, said the timing of the exchange's failure was simply too convenient, given the beating high-tech stocks took last week. "I just think it was a scam because they wanted to stop the rush on the market," Power said. "I would go with the conspiracy theory on this one because they didn't want to follow the Nasdaq down, but even with all the falls on Nasdaq, it's only gone down to where it was on 1 January." Chris Setz, president of the Network Professional Association, disagreed. He commented: "It's not a spoof. It happens. It's happened to IBM - it's happened to everyone." The cause of the system crash is still unknown, although the Financial Services Authority has launched an investigation into the incident. But Setz argued that no matter the technical explanation, the root cause will be lack of resources devoted to IT, and management at LSE will have to answer for that. "These systems need to be bullet-proofed," he said. "These are mission-critical systems and they have to be better. So let's give the blame to the directors of the Stock Exchange." A spokesman for the LSE denied any conspiracy was the cause of the crash. He said: "a technical fault in one of the components in the overnight processing of data in the London Market Information Link system caused the failure." He added that the exchange is investigating the failure with the help of its partner Andersen Consulting and the results should be made public in the next few weeks. You can see the full Behind the Headlines programme in our IT Law Channel (http://www.silicon.com/a36807 ).