Hinrichsen on Iraq’s Debt Restructuring

Iraq’s debt restructuring a decade and a half ago was one of the few things that went right with the US incursion into that country in 2003.  Thanks to a combination of an expensive war with Iran, mismanagement and corruption on the part of Saddam and his henchmen, and the debilitating effect of international sanctions on the economy, Iraq in 2003 found itself with one of the largest sovereign defaulted debt stocks in history.  Worse, thanks to the sanctions regime, much of the unpaid debt had, by the time of Saddam’s removal, matured into judgements and attachment orders.  That makes a debt restructurer's job much more difficult than in a normal sovereign restructuring.  And unlike other defaulting sovereigns in the past, who had precious few assets available for creditors in foreign jurisdictions to seize, the new Iraq had oil revenues that it desperately needed to use in order to try and get back to some semblance of normalcy and growth.

The fascinating story of how the debt was accumulated and then restructured has been told in bits and pieces.  But economic historian Simon Hinrichsen is the first, to my knowledge, to attempt to tell the full story. His draft article, “Tracing Iraqi Debt Through Defaults and Restructurings”, hot off the presses, is available on the LSE Econ History website here.  Among the most interesting aspects of the story are the use of UN Security Council Resolutions and US Executive Orders to immunize Iraqi oil assets (hence, neutralizing the risk of attacks by holdout creditors) and the attempted resuscitation of the ancient doctrine of Odious Debts. The former succeeded and the latter failed.  Many of these same issues are going to come up again when Venezuela embarks on its post-Maduro restructuring (see here and here).  I wonder how they will play out.

Simon's abstract is as follows:

In 1979 Iraq was a net creditor to the world, due to its large oil reserves and lack of external debt. Fifteen years later, its government debt-to-GDP was over 1,000%. At the time of the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq was saddled with around $130 billion in external debt that needed to be restructured. How does a country incur so much debt, so fast, and how does it get out of it? In answering this question, the paper makes two key contributions. First, I reconstruct the build-up of Iraqi debt through the 1980s and 1990s using mainly secondary sources. This paper is the first to create a debt series going back to 1979. The rise in Iraqi indebtedness was a consequence of global geopolitical trends in the 1980s where political lending trumped solvency concerns. Second, through primary sources and interviews with key actors involved, I use oral history to tell the story the Iraqi restructuring. It was one of the largest in history, yet no clear and detailed historical account exists. The restructuring was permeated by politics to inflict harsh terms on creditors at the Paris Club, at a time when creditor-friendly restructurings were the norm. In going for a politically expedient deal, however, the restructuring missed an opportunity to enshrine a doctrine of odious debt in international law

 

Yadav on Dodgy Debt Buybacks

I’ve long been fascinated by debt buybacks by issuers, in large part because they seemed to occupy a loophole in the securities disclosure laws.  A company could do a buyback of bonds and, because bondholders are not owed fiduciary duties by the company, there was no requirement for disclosure. That means that the company, to the extent it was in possession of secret information (the discovery of a gold mine, for example), could screw over the bondholders by buying back their securities before the news got out and the price went up.  Of course, the gold mine situation doesn’t occur all that often. But in the area that I do most of my research in, sovereign bonds, there are often large asymmetries of information between issuers and creditors. And yet, one rarely sees large scale buybacks of debt. (for the classic piece on sovereign buybacks, by Bulow and Rogoff, see here).

For years though, I’ve thought that this topic was of interest to no more than the three or four people in the legal academy who found bonds interesting (Marcel Kahan, Bill Bratton and a couple of others).  But just a few days ago I came across a wonderful new article by Yesha Yadav on precisely this topic. The draft article, “Debt Buybacks and the Myth of Creditor Power” is available here.  Yesha argues that the dramatic increase in corporate debt buybacks in recent years (apparently in the trillions of dollars) should be concerning not just because of the aforementioned disclosure loophole, but because these buybacks undermine corporate governance (when they are done in order to strip covenants) and allow shady behavior by banks seeking to increase the value of their loans at the expense of bondholders.

The story Yesha tells is more than plausible and she gives lots of vivid examples that support her arguments.  Since my particular interest is in flaws in the bond contract drafting process, the questions that her article raised for me have to do with why private contracting has not fixed the problem she identifies.  After all, the parties involved in these deals are super rich and sophisticated (with the fanciest of Wall Street law firms at their beck and call).

Christine Chabot on "Is the Federal Reserve Constitutional?"

I hate to admit that I'm beginning to find constitutional law interesting. First, there was the Puerto Rico v. Aurelius case that was argued at the Court a few weeks ago.  And then, a few days ago, I came across Christine Chabot's “Is the Federal Reserve Constitutional? An Originalist Argument for Independent Agencies” (here).

The background here is that a number of scholars have, in recent years, raised the question of whether the manner in which some FOMC members are appointed conflicts with the dictates of Article II's Appointments Clause (yes, the same clause that is central to the Puerto Rico v. Aurelius battle). Chabot's wonderful article unpacks the history of the obscure Sinking Fund Commission to show that, even under an originalist perspective, the current structure of the FOMC holds up.

Even if you have no interest in the constitutional debate, the historical and institutional origins of the open markets purchasing authority are fascinating -- I did not know that Alexander Hamilton had set up the federal open market committee to support the price of US debt. This first FOMC had Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and John Jay conducting independent monetary policy. Wow.

Here is the abstract:

The President’s inability to control the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy decisions raises significant constitutional concerns. The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee executes critical statutory mandates when it buys or sells U.S. securities in order to expand or contract the money supply, and yet the Committee’s twelve voting members check one another instead of answering directly to the President. The President cannot remove Committee members who refuse to carry out his monetary policy directives. Seven of the Committee’s twelve voting members are Federal Reserve governors who enjoy for-cause protections from removal by the President. Congress delegated power to supervise and remove the remaining five voting members, who are presidents of regional Federal Reserve banks, to the governors rather than the President. Further, the President has no say in the appointment of regional bank presidents to the Committee. While the Committee’s independence and appointments process would likely pass muster under current precedent, a growing chorus of originalists have argued that the Constitution requires greater executive control and a more expansive application of Article II’s Appointments Clause requirements.

This paper demonstrates that existing originalist accounts are incomplete. They do not account for the structural independence of an obscure agency known as the Sinking Fund Commission. This Commission was proposed by Alexander Hamilton, passed into law by the First Congress, and signed into law by President George Washington. One would expect all of these actors to have a clear grasp on the original public meaning of the Constitution, as well as a strong dedication to the structural commitments established therein. Their decisions to form a Sinking Fund Commission with multiple members to check one another — and to include the Vice President and Chief Justice as Commissioners who cannot be replaced or removed by the President — belie the notion that an independent agency structure violates the newly minted Constitution. The Sinking Fund Commission directed open market purchases of U.S. securities pursuant to a statutory mandate. It provides a direct historical analogue to the Federal Open Market Committee’s independent purchases of U.S. securities pursuant to a statutory mandate. This analysis shows that the structure of the Open Market Committee is not a novel invention of the twentieth century. Rather, the independence stemming from the Committee’s multi-headed structure and protections from removal has an impeccable originalist provenance which dates all the way back to Alexander Hamilton and the First Congress.

Aurelius v. Puerto Rican Control Board (or "Do Activist Hedgies Add Value?")

This post draws considerably from research on Puerto Rico and its current constitutional status with Joseph Blocher (see here).

Tuesday was oral argument day at the Supreme Court in the battle between the Puerto Rican Control Board and a big bad hedge fund, Aurelius.  Aurelius, zealous defender of the constitution that it is, had brought a challenge to the constitutionality of the Control Board. The claim being that the failure of President Obama and the then Congress to follow the strictures of the Constitution for the appointment of principal officers of the federal government (nomination by the President, followed by Senate confirmation) made the Board and all its actions invalid.

I am not a constitutional scholar and don’t have any desire to be one.  Still, the basic issue here seems fairly simple:  Are the members of the Control Board principal federal officers?

The Puzzling Pricing of Venezuelan Sovereign Bonds

by Mark Weidemaier & Mitu Gulati

Venezuela’s sovereign bonds differ in ways that should, in theory, be reflected in market prices. For example, depending on the bond, the vote required to modify payment terms through the collective action clause (CACs) varies from 100% (requiring each holder to assent), to 85%, to 75%. Bonds with higher voting thresholds are harder to restructure and one would think prices would reflect this. Two bonds issued by state oil company PDVSA also have legal features that one might expect to have pricing implications. One bond benefits from a pledge of collateral (the PDVSA 2020) and, in consequence, should be priced higher than otherwise-comparable bonds. A second was issued at a particularly large original issue discount (OID); this is a potential legal defect that should lower its price. This is the so-called “Hunger bond” (PDVSA 2022 —see here, here and here for more)).

Although these differences seem like they should matter, reports from the European markets (where the bonds can still be traded) indicate that bid prices for Venezuelan sovereign bonds range from around 13.0 to 13.5 cents on the dollar, while ask prices range from about 14.5 to 15.5. Moreover, prices on the bonds with different voting thresholds are identical. That is, the bonds that cannot be restructured except with each creditor’s assent are trading the same as bonds that allow a creditor majority of 85% or 75% to force restructuring terms on dissenters. But why? Venezuela is in full-fledged default, when legal protections should matter the most.  Shouldn’t these non-US investors (US investors can’t buy, given OFAC sanctions) be offering higher prices for bonds with better terms?

Badawi & de Fontenay Paper on EBITDA Definitions

I confess that, on its face, this did not strike me as the most exciting topic to read about (and that comes from someone who writes about the incredibly obscure world of sovereign debt contracts).  After all, who even knows what EBITDA definitions are?  Sounds like something from the tax or bankruptcy code.  But don’t let the topic be off putting.  This is a wonderfully interesting project; and elegantly executed (here).  By the way, EBITDA stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation blah blah. Turns out it is especially important for young companies, where potential investors want to know about the cash flow being generated (Matt Levine has been writing about it recently in the context of the WeWork debacle - here). It is also very important because it generally ties into the covenants in the debt instrument and can impact whether or not the covenants are violated.

Using machine learning techniques, Adam and Elisabeth look at the EBITDA definitions in thousands of supposedly boilerplate debt contracts.  And they find a huge amount of variation in this supposedly boilerplate term; variation that can end up making a big difference to the parties involved. (For those interested, there is a nice prior study by Mark Weidemaier in the on how supposedly boilerplate dispute resolution terms in sovereign bonds are often not really all that close (here); and John Coyle’s recent work on choice-of-law provisions in corporate bonds is also along these lines (here))

The question that naturally arises here is whether the variation in these EBITDA definitions is the product of conscious and smart lawyering or just random variation that arises as contracts are copied and pasted over generations. (for more on this, see here (Anderson & Manns) and here (Anderson)). My understanding of the results is that these definitions are definitely not the product of random variation; instead, there seems to be a lot of sneaky lawyering to inflate the supposedly standard EBITDA measure.

Matt Levine, Insider Trading and Mr. Potato Chip

Matt Levine is my favorite financial journalist to read on a regular basis because he is so darn funny (yes, there is lots of substance too, but I'm shallow and want to be entertained). Today's piece though, especially to someone who used to teach the law on insider trading, was priceless.

I want to cut and paste the entire piece here, because it made me smile and laugh out loud at the same time.  But I worry that Bloomberg might get annoyed and chase after me for stealing their content.  The link is here -- hope you find it as funny I did.

 

Two New Podcasts: Succession/Slate Money and The Business Scholarship Podcast

I loved the first season of HBO’s Succession.  Superb acting, great sets, and a story about a totally dysfunctional family (that makes me think that my own dysfunctional one is relatively functional).  Plus, the really really rich and despicable people in the show (modeled on actual really really rich people – see here) are miserable – and I can’t help but be entertained by that. All of that said, I did not realize, until I heard the wonderful and brilliant combination of Felix Salmon, Emily Peck and Anna Szymanski discuss the show on their Slate Money podcast a few weeks ago, how much of the show connected to interesting corporate law questions. Long story short, for those of you who love Succession and teach business law stuff, I think you will enjoy the combination of watching the show and listening to the special Slate Money podcasts about the show (this is just a season 2 thing).  Actually, you don’t need to give a rat’s ass about corporate law to enjoy the combination of watching Succession in the late evening and listening to Slate Money the next morning.  In fact, there have been occasions where I’ve enjoyed the podcast more than the particular episode of Succession.

And, while on the subject of podcasts, I recently came across an excellent podcast that discusses new financial law papers. It is run by Andrew Jennings at Stanford Law (here). Andrew is unfailingly polite, but he clearly has thought about the papers in question and asks tough questions.  I’ve only listened to a couple of episodes so far, but I plan to try and listen to them all.  I especially liked the podcast about Cathy Hwang’s 2019 paper on “Faux Contracts” and the roles that contracts can play even when there is no enforcement possibility (podcast is here; paper is here). I’m especially intrigued by Cathy’s concept of intra-deal reputation that constrains parties from acting opportunistically – something that she documents with detailed interviews. This intra-deal effect (it isn’t quite reputation; but something in the vein of reciprocal fairness) seems to operate on parties in individual deals even though the parties are not trying to preserve any sort of longer-term repeat-player reputation. Clearly a paper, I need to read.

Trump, Denmark and Greenland: What Next?

(This post draws directly from ideas from co authored work with Joseph Blocher; and particularly the numerous discussions we have had about the incentives that a market for sovereign control might create for nations to take better care of their minority populations in outlying areas (e.g., the US and Puerto Rico).  Mistakes in the discussion below, however, are solely mine).

It seems like forever ago, but it has only been a few weeks since the news came out that our esteemed chief executive wanted the US to purchase Greenland.  The notion was widely ridiculed in the press and provided wonderful fodder for comics around the globe.  But as people looked beneath the surface, it quickly became apparent that there was nothing in international law that prohibited the purchase and sale of sovereign control over a territory.  Where Trump was wrong was in his assumption that he needed to purchase Greenland from the Danes.  Under post World War II international law, however, a former colony such as Greenland has the right of self determination.  To quote the Danish prime minister, responding to Trump, “Greenland is not Danish. Greenland belongs to Greenland.”

The Danish PM also said “I strongly hope that this is not meant seriously.”  And, from her perspective of apparently wanting to keep the status quo of Greenland being part of Denmark, it makes sense that that’s what she hopes.  But let us focus on the words “Greenland is not Danish. Greenland belongs to Greenland.” If one thinks about those words just a little, they mean that Trump’s purchase (and maybe he should start calling this a “merger”, since that seems more polite) is perhaps a lot easier to execute than he initially thought.

Trump and any other suitors that Greenland might have (Canada, China, Iceland, Russia, etc.) need to only focus their attention on making the Greenlanders happy; they don’t need to worry about the Danes. No need for Trump to do diplomatic trips to Copenhagen. Trips should be to Nuuk instead. After all, it is the approval of the 55,000 Greenlanders that he needs.

How many Greenlander votes, specifically? (assuming that there would need to be a referendum first). International law doesn’t clearly say; but surely more than a majority – and ideally with a voting mechanism designed in such a way that the rights of the minority that might not want to be part of the merger being appropriately protected.

The point is that if DJT and his supporters remain committed to the Greenland strategy – and it appears they do (see here) – the next step is will be to persuade the people of Greenland that this merger is in their interest. That way, the next time Trump offers a merger deal to the roughly 55,000 Greenlanders, they will react with enthusiasm rather than horror.  One would expect, therefore, to see the US taking steps to mount the charm offensive in Greenland. And, as it turns out, preliminary steps in this direction have already been announced with the US planning to open a consulate in Greenland and engage in various outreach programs as part of its broader arctic charm strategy (here).

Anderson and Nyarko's Cool New Papers on Contract Evolution

Two of the contracts papers I’ve been most looking forward to this fall have just been posted on ssrn. They are are Rob Anderson’s “An Evolutionary Perspective on Contracting: Evidence From Poison Pills” (here) and Julian Nyarko’s “Stickiness and Incomplete Contracts” (here).

Both papers aim at deepening our understanding of how contracts evolve and, in particular, why they evolve in ways so very different from the standard model used in law schools where parties are assumed to negotiate for an optimal set of terms for their relationships.

One would predict a very different set of contract terms for parties if one takes the contract production process seriously and thinks of contract provisions as products (ala Barak Richman, here) or product attributes (ala Doug Baird, here).  Specifically, Rob and Julian both use models of contract production where new contracts are constructed by building on pre-existing templates.

In this world, one should expect a high degree of path dependence in the data.  And that is precisely what Rob and Julian demonstrate, looking at two very different areas of commercial contracting – poison pill and choice-of-forum provisions. The implications of their papers, both of which are studying the most sophisticated and well-heeled of all contracting parties, for the one of the core exercises in contract law – how should judges interpret contracts – are considerable.  That said – and this is not meant to take away from the two papers at all -- these papers are more about empirically documenting and understanding the phenomena than normative questions of what judges should be doing.

There is an enormous amount of new material in both papers and I will not do more than scratch the surface in terms of their respective contributions.  Here, however, are a couple of things about each of the papers that stood out to me.

Do Judges Do Contract Interpretation Differently During Crisis Times?

Scholars of constitutional law and judicial behavior have long conjectured that judges behave differently during times of crisis. In particular, the frequently made claim is that judges “rally around the flag”.  The classic example is that of judges being less willing to recognize civil rights during times of war (for discussions of this literature, see here, from Oren Gross and Fionnuala Aolain; and here, for an empirical analysis of the topic from Lee Epstein and co authors).

But what about financial crises?  Are judges affected enough by big financial crises to change their behavior and, for example, rule more leniently for debtors who unexpectedly find themselves being foreclosed on? In a paper from a few years ago, Georg Vanberg and I hypothesized that a concern with needing to help save the US economy from the depression of the 1930s may have been part of the dynamic explaining the Supreme Court’s puzzling decision in the Gold Clause cases (here).

A fascinating new paper from my colleague, Emily Strauss (here), analyzes this question in the context of the 2007-08 financial crisis.  Emily finds that lower courts judges, in a series of mortgage portfolio contracts cases during the crisis and in the half dozen years after, made decisions squarely at odds with the explicit language of the contracts in question.  From a pragmatic perspective, it is arguable that they had to; the contracts were basically unworkable otherwise.  But, as mentioned, this conflicted with the explicit language of the contracts. And judges, especially in New York, like to follow the strict language of the contracts (or so they say).   Then, and I think this is the most interesting bit of the story, Emily finds that, starting in roughly 2015 (and after the crisis looked to have passed), the judges change their tune and go back to their strict reading of the contract language.

Here is Emily’s abstract that explains what happened better than I can:

Why might judges interpret a boilerplate contractual clause to reach a result clearly at odds with its plain language? Though courts don’t acknowledge it, one reason might be economic crisis. Boilerplate provisions are pervasive, and enforcing some clauses as written might cause additional upheaval during a panic. Under such circumstances, particularly where other government interventions to shore up the market are exhausted, one can make a compelling argument that courts should interpret an agreement to help stabilize a situation threatening to spin out of control.  

This Article argues that courts have in fact done this by engaging in “crisis construction.” Crisis construction refers to the act of interpreting contractual language in light of concurrent economic turmoil. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, trustees holding residential mortgage backed securities sued securities sponsors en masse on contracts warranting the quality of the mortgages sold to the trusts. These contracts almost universally contained provisions requiring sponsors to repurchase individual noncompliant loans on an individual basis. Nevertheless, court after court permitted trustees to prove their cases by sampling rather than forcing them to proceed on a loan by loan basis.

My Favorite Contract Metaphors: Skeuomorphs, Sea Squirts, Barnacles and Black Holes

I love contract metaphors. I’m especially fond of metaphors for the phenomenon of antiquated and useless contract provisions that find a way to persist over the decades in boilerplate contracts.  Philip Wood, the legendary English lawyer, uses the metaphor of barnacles on a ship’s hull to describe how more and more of these useless provisions can accumulate over the years, eventually severely impacting the efficiency of the ship. If you like boats and hate barnacles (perhaps because one of your most hated chores in the summers was for you to attempt to scrape barnacles off the hull of your uncle’s fishing boat), this metaphor may work especially well for you (sorry, Uncle Marvin). Another favorite of mine, that does not bring up memories of unpleasant chores, is Doug Baird’s skeuomorph.  To quote Douglas, who in the course of his explaining why we should not be surprised that suboptimal contract terms both emerge and then persist, has some wonderful examples:

To take a[n] . . .  example, maple syrup is often sold in a glass bottle with a small handle that serves no discernable utilitarian purpose. This is a relic of the time when maple syrup came in jugs and the handles were large enough to be useful. This phenomenon—of a product feature persisting when incorporated in a new environment in which it no longer serves a function—is well known and has a name: skeuomorph.

Douglas goes on to explain that these skeuomorphs can bizarrely become desired features of the product in question (and remember he is drawing an analogy to contract drafting). He writes, while continuing with the maple syrup bottle example:

Buyers of maple syrup want to see a small handle on the bottle. It serves no purpose, but it is what consumers have come to expect. Blue jeans are no longer made for working men who carry pocket watches, but buyers of blue jeans want a watch pocket all the same, even though they have no idea of the purpose it serves and have no use for it. Everyone expects Worcestershire Sauce bottles to come wrapped in paper even though the reason for doing this has long disappeared. Tagines took a particular shape for functional reasons when they were made of clay, and they retained this shape when made of aluminum even though there was no longer a functional reason for doing so. Skeuomorphs can be found everywhere on the “desktops” of personal computers

In short, the idea that a clause could be added to a contract and remain there merely because everyone expected it to be there suggests nothing special about either pari passu clauses in particular or contract terms more generally. The same forces are at work as with ordinary product attributes. Crafting legal prose is hard, and few contracts are ever written from scratch. Lawyers almost always start with a template taken from someplace else. For this reason, those who draft contracts are likely to import features from earlier contracting environments, even when they serve no purpose, merely because they are familiar. To give another example involving financial instruments, the first railway bonds were based on real estate mortgages. They still bear some of the attributes of real estate mortgages, and not always for the better.

If you like this topic, I recommend Douglas’ piece “Pari Passu Clauses and the Skeuomorph Problem in Contract Law” (you should of course ignore all the bits of this brilliant piece that are critical of my paper with Bob Scott and Steve Choi on Contractual Black Holes (yes, another metaphor I’m very fond of) that Douglas’ piece was a comment on).

Last but not least is the Sea Squirt, a close cousin of the barnacle.  This one comes from M&A guru, Glenn West who was speaking on a panel at UT in 2018 on M&A Contracting.  The title of his presentation was: “Have Sea Squirts Invaded Your Contract?—Avoiding Mindless Use of So Called ‘Market’ Terms You May or May Not Understand”.  Below I’ve excerpted some priceless language from an August 2017 blog post by Glenn on MAC clauses in M&A agreements.  And yes, Glenn is talking about M&A contracts containing brainless bits of language; the contracts drafted by the most elite among all transactional lawyers.

As an aside, there are a number of excellent recent papers arguing over how brainless M&A contracts are; see here (Anderson & Manns) and here (Coates, Palia & Wu).

From Glenn’s blog post, here goes:

The sea squirt is an animal that begins life with a brain and a tail.  Immediately after it is born, it uses its brain and tail to propel itself through the water until it finds some rockto attach itself.  Once it attaches itself to that rock it consumes its brain, absorbs its tail, and thereafter never moves again; it lives out its remaining life as a brainless water filter.

Many of the standard terms of M&A agreements also began their existence with a brain—the brain of a smart lawyer who perceived an issue that needed to be addressed and drafted a clause to address it.  And then other smart lawyers recognized the value of that newly drafted clause, and adapted and improved it until it became a standard part of most M&A agreements.  But once that clause became attached to the “market” it became divorced from the brain or brains that created it, and soon everyone was using it regardless of whether they truly understood all the reasons that prompted its drafting.  Even worse, market attachment is so strong that even after a standard clause has been repeatedly interpreted by courts to have a meaning that differs from the meaning ascribed to that clause by those who purport to know but do not actual know its meaning (mindlessly using the now brainless clause), it continues to be used without modification.  Such is the case for many with the ubiquitous Material Adverse Change (“MAC”) or Material Adverse Effect (“MAE”) clause.

My friend at UNC Chapel Hill, John Coyle, has an article coming out soon on “Contract as Swag”.  I’m eager to see how that metaphor will work. I like swag and I want learn how to get more of it.

Trump Wants to Buy Greenland for the U.S. – But Who Is the Relevant Seller?

(This post draws from my prior work with Joseph Blocher and the many conversations we have had about this topic over the years; he bears no responsibility for errors and sarcasm)

According to a flurry of news reports from the WSJ, CNN, Bloomberg, the NYT and many more, our eminent chief executive has an interest in the possibility of buying Greenland.  Most reactions to this news of DJT’s latest whim have boiled down to incredulity, while also generating a fair amount of mirth (see here, here and here).  What has interested us the most, though, are the articles that have concluded that the U.S. cannot buy Greenland. Bloomberg’s Quick Take ran the title – “Can Trump Actually Buy Greenland – The Short Answer is No”. 

But is that really the case? The relevant international law seems to present no explicit barrier to nations buying and selling territory (here). Indeed, much of today’s United States was acquired through the purchase of territory.  The barrier that most commentators see as insurmountable is not legal, but rather the lack of a willing seller.  Maybe so.  But a handful of quotes from government officials and politicians in Denmark and a few from politicians in Greenland (see here and here) is not necessarily enough to conclude that this trade could never work.

Before jumping to the foregoing conclusion, one needs to first ask how such a sale would work.

Coyle on Studying the History of a Contract Provision

The way many of us teach interpretation in Contract Law, there is little role for history (admittedly, this is just based on casual observation). The meaning of a clause is a function of the words that make up that clause.  The parties to the transaction are assumed to have drafted it to document the key aspects of their transaction, to balance risks and rewards blah blah.  If a dispute arises, we might have an argument as to whether a strict textualist reading of the words accurately represent what the parties really meant by them or whether we need to also examine the context of the relationship. What we do not ever do, however, is to delve into the history of the clause from before these parties contemplated using it – that is, of what prior drafters of the original versions of this clause might have meant in using it.

The foregoing makes sense in a world in which the contracts for each deal are drafted from scratch. But does anyone draft contracts from scratch?  What if we live in a world where 99.9% of contracts are made up of provisions cut and paste from prior deals; provisions that are assumed to cover all the key contingencies, but not necessarily understood (or even read)? In this latter world, where there are lots of provisions that the parties to the transaction never fully focused on (let alone understood), might there be an argument – in cases where there are interpretive disputes -- for the use of a contract provision’s history? Might that history not sometimes be more relevant than the non-understandings of the parties as to what they did or did not understand they were contracting for? (Among the few pieces that wrestle with this question are these two gems: Lee Buchheit's Contract Paleontology here and Mark Weidemaier's Indiana Jones: Contract Originalist here)

I’m not sure what the answer to the foregoing question is. But it intrigues me.  And it connects to a wonderfully fresh new body of research in Contract Law where a number of scholars have been studying the production process for modern contracts.  The list of papers and scholars here is too long to do justice to and I’ll just end up making mistakes if I try to do a list.  But what unites this group of contract scholars is that for them it isn’t enough to assume that contracts show up fully formed at the time of a deal, purely the product of the brilliant minds of the deal makers who anticipate nearly every possible contingency at the start.  Instead, understanding what provisions show up in a contract, and in what formulation, requires understanding the contract production process. (Barak Richman's delightful "Contracts Meet Henry Ford" (here) is, to my mind, foundational).

It is perhaps too early to tell whether this research will catch on and revolutionize contract law. I hope it does, but I’m biased.

One of my favorite papers in this new body of contract scholarship showed up recently on ssrn. It is John Coyle’s “A History of the Choice-of-Law Clause” (here). I have rarely found a piece of legal scholarship so compelling.  The paper is not only a model of clarity in terms of the writing, but it is brave. It is completely unapologetic in not only taking on an entirely new mode of research (a painstaking documentation of the historical evolution of the most important terms in any and every contract), but in coming up with a cool and innovative research technique for unpacking that history (this project would have been impossible to do without that innovation).

Ramming Bow Contracts

Have you heard of Ramming Bows? Or did you know that they describe a category of boilerplate contract provisions?  Until a couple of weeks ago, I had not either.  That was when I came across Glenn West’s two delightful blog posts at the Weil Gotshal & Manges site (here and here). Glenn is a senior partner in the Private Equity/M&A practice at Weil. And in his spare time, he writes wonderfully witty blog posts and articles about wide range of legal issues; many of which are about the bizarre world of sophisticated boilerplate contracting.  Even if you have no interest in contract law, let alone boilerplate contracts, I suspect that you will enjoy his writing.  It is insightful about the way in which contracts get produced and evolve in the real world and, even better, is funny.

Yannis Manuelides Paper on the Limits of the "Local Law Advantage" in Eurozone Sovereign Bonds

Sovereign debt guru and Allen & Overy partner, Yannis Manuelides has a new paper (here) out on the “local law advantage” in Euro area sovereign bonds.  This paper, along with Mark Weidemaier’s paper from the beginning of the summer (here – and a prior creditslips discussion about it here), helps shed light the thorny question of which European local-law sovereign bonds should be valued more by investors: Ones with CACs or ones without them.  Given that there are billions of euros worth of these bonds with and without CACs being traded every day, one might have thought that there would be clear answers to these questions from the issuing authorities themselves.  There are not.  Further, some of the folks at the various government debt offices take the bizarre (to me) view that answering this question might somehow scare the market.

Reparations Claims by the Herero and Nama Against Germany

About two years ago, in 2017, an intriguing lawsuit was filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act in New York. It was filed by members of the Herero and Nama tribes for the genocide of their ancestors that took place in what is now known as Namibia. In March this year, Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who readers of this blog may know from the Puerto Rican financial drama, ruled that the claims against Germany were barred by that nation’s right of sovereign immunity. As an aside, having oversight of the Puerto Rican debt debacle is not Judge Swain’s only connection to sovereign debt lore – she also sits in the judgeship vacated by none other than Judge Thomas Griesa of pari passu infamy. For accounts of the above mentioned class action by the Herero and Nama, see here and here. (Lawsuits on roughly similar grounds had been attempted earlier as well; see here).

This outcome is probably not surprising for anyone who has followed the fate of human rights litigation over the past few years brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act. Basically, under the direction of the Supreme Court, the possibilities for victims of human rights violations that took place overseas to foreigners with no more than minimal connections to the US (in terms of the claims themselves) have been severely curtailed.

My reason for bringing this up is that this is a history that I knew little about until I started coming across references to the genocide in Namibia in accounts of the Congo where, similar horrors were taking place in the 1890s and early 1900s under King Leopold of Belgium (Joseph Blocher and I have been working on the question of contemporary implications for international law of the transfer of control that took place after the genocide in the Congo (here)). Still though, these references didn’t give me anything close to a sense of how horrific things had been there.

That is, until I came across this case and began reading the filings in more detail. And one of the most interesting pieces I’ve found is by German scholar Matthias Goldman that both uses original archival research to describes the events that took place and uses them to question our contemporary understanding of the law of sovereignty. The law of sovereignty, as with all of customary international law, is based on assumptions (often faulty – as Matthias shows in this case) about history. The article, “The Entanglement of Property and Sovereignty in International Law”, is short and eminently readable (here). Matthias, who many slipsters know because of his work on sovereign debt matters, has not only been writing on the topic of the genocide in South Western Africa but has also been involved in the court case (he filed an affidavit in the Herero and Nama lawsuit).

I hope that Judge Swain’s decision is not the end of the road for the claims of reparations by the Herero and Nama. Maybe they will have better fortune with a filing in a German court?

The Mad Mad World of "No Contest" Provisions in Wills

It has been almost twenty-five years since I got hooked on the puzzle of why boilerplate financial contracts, even among the most sophisticated parties, have inefficient terms. Steve Choi and I were taking Marcel Kahan’s Corporate Bond class and we couldn’t understand why the classical model with its highly informed repeat players (with everyone hiring expensive lawyers) wasn’t working to produce the optimal package of contract terms. Marcel presented a very coherent set of explanations for this phenomenon of contract stickiness having to do primarily with network and learning externalities.  And under that model, it was plausible to have equilibria where sophisticated commercial parties and their lawyers could know that they had suboptimal contract terms and yet be somehow unable to change them easily (thereby creating the phenomenon of “sticky” contracts).  Marcel though repeatedly emphasized to us that he had but scratched the surface of a topic worthy of much more investigation (for the classic Kahan & Klausner (1997) paper and its equally wonderful predecessor by Goetz & Scott (1985), see here and here).

Over the past two decades, since the publication of Kahan & Klausner’s sticky boilerplate paper, there have been a number of advances to our thinking about the phenomenon of sticky boilerplate. Most of them, however, have been focused on the worlds of mass market contracts of sophisticated finance or transactions where one of the sides to the transaction is a big repeat player (corporate bonds, sovereign bonds, M&A contracts, insurance). 

A wonderful new boilerplate paper though takes on an altogether unexpected area where I had always thought of the contract-type instruments as being highly tailored: that of Wills. The paper is “Boilerplate No Contest Clauses” posted about a month ago by David Horton (UC Davis) and Reid Weisbord (Rutgers). 

The paper identifies a persistent inefficiency in Wills – an area that I suspect most contract boilerplate scholars are utterly unaware to. That itself is interesting. But this paper goes beyond the traditional boilerplate contract scholarship which, as noted, identified the stickiness problem in mass market contracts.  Wills, as I understand the story that David and Reid tell, tend to always have both an element of tailoring for the individual client and an element of blind unthinking cutting and pasting from prior standard forms. What David and Reid show beautifully in their paper is that the boilerplate portion of the contract (and specifically, the “No Contest” provision) can often undermine the tailored portion that more specifically reflects the intent of the party making the Will.

For those not familiar with these clauses, the following is typical:

If any beneficiary under this Will in any manner, directly or indirectly, contests or attacks this Will or any of its provisions, any share of interest in my estate given to that contesting beneficiary under this Will is revoked . . . . “

Basically, this says: Don’t you dare challenge this Will. If you do, you might lose everything.

Problem is, as David and Reid explain, that there are situations where complications arise with the Will and someone has to go to court to get the complications resolved. That then presents the risk that some dastardly beneficiary will claim that the No Contest clause has been triggered vis-à-vis the innocent beneficiary who is just trying to solve a problem with the Will that the testator didn’t take into account. End result: The intentions of the testator are undermined. Even if the court ultimately tosses the challenges being made on the basis of the No Contest clause, time and money gets wasted.

Why does this clause persist?  The answer given by Reid and David is straightforward: These clauses are cut and paste from prior Wills without thought. They are part of the boilerplate that neither the lawyers nor their clients pay any attention to.  But why not?  The standard explanations from the boilerplate literature such as network/learning externalities, first mover disadvantages, negative signaling, status quo bias, inadequate litigation, etc., do not seem to apply particularly well.  Nor do explanations about big firms who are repeat players exploiting innocent customers who are one shot players.  So, given that the standard explanations do not work, why is the subset of the market for legal services not working?  Are the lawyers not being paid enough to read the boilerplate portions of the Wills and think through the contingencies?  (Best I can tell, the lawyers do actually understand the problem, since there has been lots of litigation over these types of clauses).

The New Bond Thing: Sub Sovereign Masala Bonds?

Bored on my flight into Kerala, India’s southern most state, a few weeks ago, I picked up a newspaper lying on the empty seat next to me.  Most of the news was either about the Indian elections and how the nationalist BJP party had swept to power or about or India’s prospects in the cricket World Cup.  What caught my eye though was a little piece in the back section with a photo of luminaries from Kerala’s Marxist party at the London stock exchange. Kerala, for those who don’t know, has a long tradition of cycling between electing the supposedly anti-market Marxists and their pro-market Congress opponents. But here, I was seeing the Kerala Marxist party leaders at the London Stock Exchange.  My first thought was: This is a gag. Turned out not to be though.  The occasion was a five-year rupee denominated bond issued by Kerala, with a Canadian pension fund as its anchor investor (For more, see here).

The celebration at the London exchange was for Kerala having issued the first ever sub sovereign “masala” bond issue on the LSE.  Masala bonds are rupee-denominated bonds issued overseas (like Dim Sum, Samurai and Yankee bonds) and there are almost fifty of these masalas out there.  This though was the first one ever issued by an Indian state on the international market. I was intrigued for multiple reasons.

First, this was the first international sovereign bond of any variety from post-independence India that I had ever seen.  India has long had an enormous capacity to borrow on the international markets.  But its sovereign entities, state and federal, have staunchly refused tap this capacity until now.   

Second, I’ve long been fascinated by the question of why some countries borrow internationally at both the national and state (or sub sovereign) level (e.g., Spain), and others do their international borrowing only at the national level and effectively constrain the states to borrow from domestic markets (e.g., U.S.).  Here, we appear to have a new third category:  tapping the international market at the state level and not doing so at the national level. 

Third, I had had the vague impression that the Indian constitution barred the states from tapping the overseas markets (the language of the constitution, best I can tell, is not crystal clear on the matter).  And yet here it was: a bond issued by a wholly owned corporation of the state of Kerala (the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board or KIIFB), fully backed by a state guarantee with a rating from Fitch of BB.

Round 2 -- Do the Euro CACs Have to be Used if There is a Need to Restructure a Euro Area Sovereign's Debt?

The intriguing question raised by Mark Weidemaier’s superb new paper posted a few weeks ago (here) was whether, if a Euro area country hits a debt crisis, it would be mandatory for it to use the Euro CACs that are now part of the majority of Euro area sovereign bonds.  Mark’s paper says no (for more, see also Tyler Zellinger, here; and Buchta, Shan, Plambeck & Shufro, here).

About ten days ago, this question came up at a conference at the EUI organized by Franklin Allen, Elena Carletti and Jeromin Zettelmeyer. The plan for the conference hadn’t been to discuss this particular topic, but CACs and restructurings in the Euro area more broadly. But Mark’s paper had just come out and it turned out that almost everyone there had strong views about it; particularly in the context of thinking about Italian sovereign debt.

The panel of CAC/sovereign debt experts was: Yannis Manuelides, Anna Gelpern, Aitor Erce and Giampaolo Galli.  And the discussion – helped by interventions from experts in the audience who included Jeromin Zettelmeyer, Ignacio Tirado, Richard Portes, Lee Buchheit and Elena Carletti -- was fascinating.  Bottom line:  While experts have strong views about this topic, there is zero clarity in terms of what the policy intent was -- we are all reading the tea leaves.  Mark’s view is that the existing Euro CACs are but an option; and he makes a strong argument for that position (one that I buy).  Ignacio, however, is equally convinced of the opposite position; that the Euro area countries are stuck using the CACs if they hit a debt crisis and need to restructure (this does not mean that he thinks this is the efficient solution; just the legal mandated one).  And I have learned over the years that Ignacio is a very careful thinker and knows his European treaty law better than almost anyone.  Yannis, for his part, was – as he always is – nuanced and took a position somewhere in between.  Put differently, he refused to say whether he agreed with Mark or Igancio.  Anna too, didn’t take a side on this (although she knows the history of what was originally intended by the policy makers better than anyone).  Perhaps most interesting – especially since I had not heard his views before – was the wonderfully gracious and wise Giampaolo Galli (Economics Dept, Cattolica University, Roma), who talked explicitly and in detail about the debt situation in Italy.  For those who don't know him yet, here is his Wikipedia page (it is an understatement to say that he has had an impressive career).

My reason for putting up this post is that Giampaolo has just posted his conference draft, “Collective Action Clauses and Sovereign Debt Restructuring Frameworks: Why and When is Restructuring Appropriate” to ssrn.com (here).  The draft both addresses the question raised by Mark in a nuanced way (while also reporting the views of those in the legal department of the Italian Treasury) and goes further to ask whether the primary task of the Italian government now should be thinking of restructuring techniques or figuring out ways to improve growth and get spending under control.  Giampaolo argues persuasively that focus should be on the latter problems and not the former.  Clever restructuring techniques, he explains, may eventually be needed. But they are not the solution to the problem with the giant Italian debt.

Given the strong disagreements on this matter, and the utter lack of clarity as to what was intended by Euro area policy makers in the first place, it sure would be helpful to have some kind of legislative history as to what was intended when the Euro CACs were adopted in late 2012.   Alternatively, maybe the European authorities could tell us what they were thinking?  Or what they are thinking now about what they should have been thinking then?

The Local Law Advantage in the Euro Area: How Much of a Constraint are the Existing CACs?

Collective Action Clauses for the Euro Area were mandated, starting in January 2013.  Yes, bizarrely, even though the introduction of Euro CACs was literally the single biggest innovation in sovereign bond contract terms in the history of this market, no one seems to have a clear idea of how these CACs (contractual restructuring mechanisms) are actually going to operate.  Specifically, if a Euro area country needs to restructure some day soon (e.g., Italy?), and it has a subset of bonds with these CACs (by next year, Italy will have something close to a super majority of its bonds with these Euro CACs), is it required to use the CACs to do the restructuring or can it use other mechanisms? That is, regardless of the presence of these CACs, can the sovereign still take advantage of the fact that almost all of its multi trillion dollar debt stock is governed by Italian local law to engineer the restructuring (the "local law advantage" in the words of sovereign debt guru Lee Buchheit - see here)?

Most people I know in the European sovereign debt world take the view that the CACs will have to be used if they are in the bonds (it is a different question altogether as to what can be done with the subset of bonds without CACs and also under local law).  And, indeed, that may be why there is currently a move to reform and improve the first-generation of Euro CACs (they appear, on their face, quite vulnerable to hold outs).  But do the Euro CACs have to be used to engineer the restructuring, if the bond that needs to be restructured has them?

As an aside, some of you may remember this question recently came up in the context of measuring redenomination risk in Euro area bonds, where because of the assumption that the bonds with CACs were protected against unilateral redenomination of the currency on the bonds by the sovereign, some were trying to use the CAC bond versus No CAC bond yield differential as a measure of redenomination risk.  (See here and here, for articles from the FT along; there are many  more) [This is not at all a crazy position, since the CAC bonds require a supermajority approval of creditors (roughly) for a change to the currency of the bond; and this is indeed the view that the market appears to have taken -- see the link/graph above from the FT - but has Mark Weidemaier demonstrated that the market was wrong in a big way?  If so, that's a big deal]

To cut to the chase, our fellow slipster, Mark Weidemaier, has a superb new paper, "Restructuring Italian (or Other Euro Area) Debt: Do Euro CACs Constrain or Expand the Options?", that suggests the foregoing thinking is misguided. Best I know, Mark's paper is the first one to address this central question about Euro CACs under local law head on (although I'm optimistic that some of our students will have good papers exploring this very question in greater depth soon).  My prediction is that there are many who will disagree strongly with Mark; particularly those who see the Euro CACs as representing some sort of holy European treaty promise.  But Mark makes a powerful argument that that view is more smoke than fire.  Euro CACs, according to him, are nothing but an option for the sovereign.  That's it, he tells us; they are nothing more. The sovereign can choose not to use this option and take an alternative (easier) route to doing its restructuring.

A New Proposal for Restructuring Venezuelan Debt

The Venezuelan debt crisis has dragged on for so very long now that there are literally dozens of proposals out in the public domain (aka ssrn.com) on how Venezuela should do its restructuring.  Given how quickly the situation on the ground is changing, the plausibility of these various proposals also has been moving with great speed. 

A new and interesting one just showed up today from Daniel Osorio of Andean Capital (available here).  Daniel is someone who knows the Venezuelan situation inside out and has a lot of experience distressed debt workouts.  I don't think we agree on the optimal way to peel this onion, but Daniel is super smart and I always take his views seriously.  His proposal, as I understand it, is to do an debt exchange where investors are given what he calls Patient Capital Bonds. Basically, investors are being asked to be patient and cooperate with the Venezuelan government by giving them a lot more time to repay them (much more than say the proposals for a Venezuelan reprofiling (which would just buy the time for the IMF to do an estimate of the economic situation) have been asking for). The benefit to investors, that Daniel is positing will attract them to his proposals, is that there is a big potential upside if Venezuela is able to get economically healthy.

A couple of questions though.  First, is Daniel being unduly optimistic in assuming that the holdout problem can be easily solved?  (after all the amount of litigation on the defaulted debt is increasing on a daily basis and specialist holdout firms are the opposite of "patient" capital). Second, can Venezuela get back to health in a reasonable amount of time without imposing significant cuts on the principal obligations on its debt stock? (maybe, if the stretch out of payments is long enough, but that then brings its own problems in terms of getting investors to be that patient).

I do agree with Daniel though that stretching out payments will ultimately have to be part of the equation and that whatever mechanism that is used will need to ensure that the majority of creditors come in voluntarily (that is, the non holdouts). I also agree with him that the post-Saddam restructuring of Iraqi debt has lessons to teach us.

Here is the abstract of Daniel's nice and short paper (six pages):

Regime change in Venezuela is imminent. The transition may take longer than what most Venezuelans would like, but when it occurs it will be faster than most expected. The challenges of the reconstruction of Venezuela and its economy will be more similar to those faced by a country after a vicious war or a violent natural disaster than the aftermath of an economic and/or political crisis. First and foremost, this reconstruction must start by addressing Venezuela’s urgent humanitarian needs. This initial phase of the normalization of Venezuela must be done in a collaborative fashion between the private and public sector as well as Venezuelans and the international community. However, this spirit of collaboration must not end there, but continue in order to meet the economic challenges that Venezuela will face.

He also talked about this on the telly, on Bloomberg News. 

The Woes of PDVSA Debt Holders

Mark Weidemaier & Mitu Gulati

Many things about the current situation in Venezuela bewilder us. Among them are parts of the new sanctions.  The one that especially puzzles us is the part that says that transfers of PDVSA debt claims by US persons are only permitted to non-U.S. persons.

What could possibly be the logic here?  To attempt to see that, our first question was: What is the likely effect of such a constraint. Answer: To kill the liquidity of the bonds and promissory notes and any other debt instruments, since US investors are likely 50% or more of this market.  And that in turn means that the price of these PDVSA instruments is going to drop precipitously.

But why hurt the market for PDVSA debt instruments so viciously?  Maybe the UST knows that there are large chunks of these instruments held by Maduro cronies who have been issuing these instruments to themselves (without paying fully for them) so that they have a nest egg in the event of a change in government.  But does that help get rid of Maduro and his cronies faster?  Not clear.  But maybe there is a story here. We'd love to know more.

Alternatively, and this is a bleaker story for the PDVSA holders, maybe the Trump administration knows that a future restructuring of Venezuelan debt under the new government is going to have to be particularly brutal.  And maybe they want to make sure that US holders have largely sold off their holdings to non US entities?  Maybe.  But if this is the case, then why are similar sale restrictions not being imposed on the bonds of the Republic?

Or maybe this bit of the new sanctions is just an error.  Maybe.

Mozambique’s Guarantees on the Tuna Bonds: Can They be Repudiated?

Mark Weidemaier & Mitu Gulati

There have recently been headline articles in the press about three loans made to state-owned security companies in Mozambique (see here, here and here) and guaranteed by the government. The reason for the attention to these loans – made originally between 2013 and 2014 by Credit Suisse and the Russian bank VTB – is that US federal prosecutors are pursuing charges against a number of bankers from Credit Suisse and government officials from the Mozambique finance ministry. (Somehow the VTB folks seem to have escaped so far.) To simplify, these individuals were allegedly involved in siphoning off funds ostensibly intended to support Mozambique’s fishing industry and enhanced security in its territorial waters. Concretely, the loan was supposed to be used for new boats: some to catch fish (hence the moniker “tuna bonds”) and others to bolster the coast guard (“maritime surveillance”).

Instead, much of the money seems to have disappeared. The loans went into default; few tuna were caught. For contemporaneous reporting, see here, here, and here.

We have been thinking about debt repudiation of late. And Tracy Alloway of Bloomberg (and formerly of FT Alphaville) specifically got us thinking about the Mozambique tuna bonds on a recent podcast for Bloomberg’s Odd Lots (Tracy is a spectacular host).  Prompted in part by Tracy, we wondered--now that the corruption on the part of the agents for the banks and agents within the Mozambique finance ministry has been revealed—whether the government can repudiate the loans on the grounds that they were infused with illegality.

One of the three loans is worth treating separately from the others. This loan was made specifically for tuna boats. It involved an $850m bond for a company called Ematum—allegedly a sham—which has since been converted from a state-guaranteed bond to a sovereign Eurobond. For the other two loans, the repudiation question—since the borrower companies seem to have no assets—is whether the state can withdraw its guarantee on account of the corruption. There is a good argument that the answer is “yes.” Contract law in many key legal jurisdictions makes contracts infected by corruption and bribery voidable.

Some years ago, one of us analyzed this question in an article with Lee Buchheit, where we analyzed the question of “corrupt debts” (here – at pp 1234-39). We quoted this illustrative language from a 1960 New York Court of Appeals case: “Consistent with public morality and settled public policy, we hold that a party will be denied recovery even on a contract valid on its face, if it appears that he has resorted to gravely immoral and illegal conduct in accomplishing its performance.” Jeff King, in his new book on Odious Debts (here – at pp 119-23), has a section on sovereign obligations infected by corruption and makes much the same point under English and a number of other laws. And Jason Yackee tackles the corruption defense for sovereigns in the BIT context here. Bottom line: There is a pretty good defense here.

Congolese Elections and the Opportunity for the International Community to do the Right Thing

The Congo held elections yesterday; elections that the ruling party has kept finding excuses to postpone over the past two years.  International pressure though, forced them to be held (albeit in an incomplete fashion).  Now, the question is whether the vote counts will be done with some modicum or propriety and whether the current kleptocrats will nevertheless find some way to hold on to power in this resource rich nation with a tragic history.  The latest reports are telling us that there is already chaos and that the internet has been shut down (from the Washington Post, see here).

My interest in the Congo was spurred by a question about its sovereign debt (of course). My Duke colleague and frequent co author, Joseph Blocher, who has worked in Africa and knows my obsession with sovereign debt–and particularly the question of what is to be done about the sovereign debts incurred by despotic leaders (the “Odious Debts” problem)--got me hooked on the history of the Congo some years ago by telling me the story of the debt of the Congo Free State from the late 1800s. The debt was incurred by, and proceeds subsequently stolen by, one of the worst despots in history–King Leopold of Belgium.  He issued bonds in the millions of francs in the name of the Congo Free State and then, in 1908, when the international community forced him out because of the genocide he had engineered, the debts he had incurred in the name of his vassal state were put by the international community on to the backs of the Congolese people. When it comes to the Congo, the rest of the world has so much to be ashamed about (there is a super episode from the BBC’s The Foreign Desk here). But maybe we will do the right thing this time?

Drawing from work that Joseph and I have been doing on the Congo and the infamous 1908 forced transfer of sovereignty (here), here are some thoughts on the parallels between the events of today and of a century ago.

The scene in the Congo today is, sadly, is familiar. An unaccountable leader treats Congo as personal property, enriching himself as untold millions of Congolese labor to extract resources needed for the world’s latest technological boom. What will the international community do?

Today, the despot holding power is Joseph Kabila, the resource is coltan (used in cell phones), and the international response remains uncertain. Kabila has agreed to hold elections and step down, but he and his henchmen seem to keep finding excuses to postpone the transfer of power. 

In 1908, the leader was King Leopold, the resource was rubber (made valuable by the development of vulcanization), and the international response was extraordinary: On November 15, 1908, in response to intense pressure, Belgium bought the Congo Free State from its own king.

Today, as the world is understandably focused on the present and the future of the Congo, we should not forget the lessons of its past.

A Contract Lawyer's X-mas Greeting

This arrived this morning from a dear friend, who knows what makes me laugh.  I hope it makes you chuckle, if not laugh out loud, as it did me:

Dear Mitu (a term deemed to include your assigns, heirs and successors),

We (including our officers, directors, agents and employees) send (for the avoidance of doubt, "send" shall mean authorize, execute and deliver) our warmest (measured on the Fahrenheit scale) best (understood to mean the wishes we extend on an unsecured basis to our most creditworthy correspondents) wishes (with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, as to outcome) to you and your family (including those to the second degree of consanguinity) for a Merry Christmas (without limiting the generality of the foregoing, this extension of best wishes shall be understood to include, on a pari passu basis, a Happy Christmas).

Contractual Lunacies

My friend, Glenn West, who knows my obsession with boilerplate contract terms whose meaning the parties themselves don’t seem to know, sent me a lovely present today:  A link to an article in the ABA Journal by legal writing guru Bryan Garner on “Trying to Decipher Provisions that Literally Make No Sense”.  I realize that my sense of humor is warped, but I was laughing out loud at reading this.

Here is my favorite bit:

The lunacies [of contract drafting] involve using pastiche forms riddled with wildly inconsistent ways of expressing simple duties, absurd archaisms whose purpose few lawyers can explain, and repellent typographic practices that still today make many if not most contracts grotesque to read.

What I’d like to explore in this column is the curiosity of “busts”—the prevalence of contractual provisions, sometimes perpetuated in deal after deal, that make no literal sense at all. That they exist at all is something of a marvel. After all, you’d think that transactional lawyers would adopt a protocol of reading and rereading each contract that goes out the door. Given that critical thinking and close reading are prized habits for lawyers, contradictory or outright nonsensical provisions should be exceedingly rare. Alas, they’re not.

Most experienced lawyers can recall anecdotes of contractual monstrosities. One involves a malpractice claim against a law firm: A mortgage had somehow been prepared in the early 1980s with a crucial line dropped. The sentence made no sense. The firm had prepared dozens if not hundreds of mortgages with the same language missing, resulting in an incomplete sentence that made little sense—and the sense it did seem to make resulted in a disposition that no sane drafter could have wanted. It seems that a typist had simply skipped a line and continued typing. Nobody caught the error—until a problem erupted in the early 2000s.

By that time, the faulty contract had long since become entrenched as the “firm form.” A secretarial error from a generation before had become permanently ensconced in the form.