The Missing Mediator: Why Sovereign Debt Restructuring Still Has No Seat for the Profession That Could Save It - Wolters Kluwer
The Missing Mediator: Why Sovereign Debt Restructuring Still Has No Seat for the Profession That Could Save It - Wolters Kluwer
Source: Wolters Kluwer
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DW NOTE
The IMF has supervised 475 sovereign debt restructurings since 1950. Not one included a professional mediator at the negotiating table. When Ghana defaulted in 2022, creditors took 18 months to reach a framework that required another restructuring within 30 months. When Zambia defaulted in 2020, it took three years to settle with bondholder committees that shifted membership quarterly. The profession exists—trained in multi-party dispute resolution, employed routinely in corporate bankruptcies worth a fraction of sovereign obligations. Sovereign restructurings exclude them by convention, then call the resulting chaos inevitable.