Sovereign Debt Restructuring and the Law

No issue in sovereign finance has preoccupied the attention of scholars, politicians and lawyers in this century more than the problem of holdout creditors in sovereign debt workouts. Sebastian Grund has given us a magisterial survey of how courts and arbitrators have dealt with the claims of holdout creditors in two of the largest sovereign debt restructurings in history — Argentina and Greece. Lee Buchheit, Honorary Professor, University of Edinburgh School of Law and former Senior Partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton This book is a delightful treatment of two of the most important restructurings in the modern history of sovereign debt, Argentina and Greece. While the restructurings and the central problem of holdout creditors manifested themselves in very different ways in the different cases, Grund shows us the lessons we can learn from the commonalities. The treatment of what happened in the particular cases (and there were many) is sure to be invaluable to be both scholars and practitioners. Mitu Gulati, Perre Bowen Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law Holdout creditors are a massive impediment to the orderly restructuring of sovereign debt. They are typically investors who’ve bought the debt to profit from the sovereign debtor, not the original lenders to it. This book explores the approaches of an unusually wide range of national courts to this problem, and distils the lessons from the Argentine and Greek restructurings. It sheds light on issues that need it – as those who ultimately pay the price today of these cynical investments are the poorer citizens of poor nations. Ross P Buckley, Scientia Professor & ARC Laureate Fellow, University of New South Wales Sydney