(Recasts, adds background)
LONDON, Sept 14 (Reuters) - The CREST financial markets
settlement system, which sits at the heart of more than 1
trillion pounds' ($1.29 trillion) worth of daily share and bond
trades, suffered more technical problems on Monday, forcing the
Bank of England to delay a gilt buy-back.
"Due to ongoing technical problems in CREST settlement, the
Bank announces that it will not hold gilt purchase operations
today," the BoE said.
Shortly afterwards, Euroclear said the problems had been
resolved.
CREST is the central securities depository for share and UK
government bond markets in the United Kingdom and for Irish
stocks, settling trades as the final leg of a transaction.
The BoE had been due to hold a regular 1.5 billion-pound
buy-back of British government bonds on Monday as part of its
programme to help the economy cope with the coronavirus shock.
CREST first went down on Friday after suffering technical
issues, requiring the BoE to switch to back-up procedures to
ensure settlement of transactions.
Owner Euroclear said on Sunday it would reopen early on
Monday in time for the reopening of financial markets.
Euroclear said on Monday it had identified the cause of the
new outage which was not related to Friday's one.
On Saturday, Euroclear said it had no reason to suspect a
cyber attack.
A spokeswoman for the BoE said the central bank had decided
"as a precaution" to delay Monday's short-maturity gilt purchase
operation until Thursday. Gilt purchase operations due to take
place on Tuesday and Wednesday were unaffected.
There was no impact on consumer payments, the BoE said.
($1 = 0.7782 pounds)
(Reporting by William Schomberg and Huw Jones; editing by
Michael Holden and Toby Chopra)