The Choice of Advisers for the Lebanese Restructuring

An article from a couple of days ago in L'Orient-Le Jour (here) provides a rare window into the process by which financial and legal advisers are chosen for a sovereign restructuring deal. This is the sort of stuff that people talk about quietly in back rooms -- e.g., about how there were shenanigans in the choice of advisers by the sovereign (someone's nephew getting special treatment or something else like that).  But this is the first detailed press account that I've seen.

What I was hoping for, that I didn't get from the piece though, is a sense of what restructuring strategies the different teams offered to provide the Lebanese government when they made their respective pitches. The article suggests that the different teams provided their CVs and the cost of their services.  But the article says nothing about the plans that they proffered. I'd think that if strategy A from Lazard provides for savings of $40 billion with minimal risk of litigation and only a small penalty for future borrowing and strategy B from Rothschild gets you $50 billion in savings, but a high risk of litigation and a 10 basis point higher cost to future borrowing for a couple of years, the way in which the Lebanese high command made the comparison would be the most interesting bit of the saga.  It would give us a window into what calculations the government is making about the future (and they haven't exactly covered themselves in glory on this front during the run up to this crisis).

Alas, there was no mention of the proffered strategies. Instead, the article suggests that all that these various teams brought to the table were their CVs and billing rates. Surely, that cannot be all. These are highly sophisticated lawyers and bankers and they must have planned out strategies ahead of time.

Maybe the folks at L'Orient-Le Jour will do a follow up piece.  And yes, I'm being selfish, because being able to compare the plans in class would be a wonderful learning exercise.

Comments

[Chuck M]

This is an interesting article to read. I used to work in healthcare, writing and issuing RFPs to insurance companies and then scoring their responses for selection by a state government. We carefully developed a scoring rubric that matched the government's desired program and scored each RFP response against this rubric. Maybe such a process would make the restructuring partner selection process less political and more meritocratic.