Cheaply buying up ‘bad’ debt owed by countries in distress and aggressively suing for full payment plus compound interest – that’s the modus operandi of the secretive companies known as vulture funds. Whereas in the 1980s and ’90s it was banks which pursued claims of sovereign debt, in the 2000s the vultures were responsible for 90 per cent of litigation.
The ongoing case of Argentina against NML Capital has been dubbed ‘the sovereign debt trial of the century’. It was covered at length in last month’s edition (nin.tl/11lR89k). Here we present some of the worst examples (past and present) of flesh-gouging debt collection.
