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Beleaguered bank Northern Rock has denied a report suggesting there is a hole in the company's books.

The rebuttal follows a newspaper report today which claims over 70 per cent of the Newcastle-based lender's mortgage portfolio is owned by a separate offshore company.

According to the Guardian newspaper, its investigations show Northern Rock home-loans totalling £53 billion are owned by a Jersey-based company called Granite.

The paper claims, as such, the pool of assets available to provide collateral for Northern Rock's creditors – including the Bank of England – is limited.

Government claims taxpayer's money is safe in regard to the cash lent to Northern Rock by the central bank are therefore called into question, the Guardian stressed.

Responding to the report, Northern Rock stressed its asset quality remained "strong".

"Northern Rock has assets of over £100 billion. Only around half of those assets are securitised as part of the Granite programme, leaving around £50 billion of unencumbered assets," the company said in a statement.

"Against claims Northern Rock's loan with the Bank of England is in the order of £23 billion, this would therefore suggest that Northern Rock is able to cover such a figure by around two-fold," the bank claimed.

Northern Rock is one of the country's lenders using the process of securitisation to raise funds for its operations. Under such a system lenders bundle up their loans and sell them on to investors on the credit markets.

As a result of this summer's global credit squeeze, prompted by rising default levels in the US sub-prime mortgage market, Northern Rock was forced to turn to the Bank of England for an emergency loan - having been unable to raise sufficient funds on the wholesale money markets.

The move prompted the first run on a British bank in almost 150 years and forced the government to guarantee the savings of Northern Rock customers to restore confidence in the UK banking system in the wake of the damaging incident.

Northern Rock is now considering its future, with the lender revealing on Wednesday it had received "additional indicative expressions of interest" from potential suitors.