By Lee C. Buchheit (Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP) & G. Mitu Gulati (Duke University School of Law).
There is a growing consensus that Venezuela will not be able to persist for much longer with its policy of full external debt service. The social costs are just too great. This implies a debt restructuring of some kind. Venezuela, principally through its state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (“PDVSA”), has extensive commercial contacts with the United States. Not since Mexico in the 1980s has an emerging market country with this level of commercial contacts attempted to restructure its New York law-governed sovereign debt. Holdout creditors in a restructuring of Venezuelan sovereign debt will therefore present a serious, potentially a debilitating, legal risk. The prime directive for the architects of a restructuring of Venezuelan debt will be to neutralize this risk.
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