On International Award Enforcement

Plus a favorite idea with parallels to BUR/YPF

This post is co-written by Andrew Walker (YAVB) & Chris DeMuth (Sifting the World)

There’s a reason Burford Capital bought Focus Intelligence back in 2015. Winning a litigation is one thing, but where the judgment creditor is a foreign entity—or worse, a foreign sovereign—the collections process presents a whole new set of challenges that stand in the way of the victor and its big, fat check.

The first problem is simply finding the assets to which your judgment can attach. Not every jurisdiction makes it easy for foreign judgment creditors to exert conservatorship over domestic assets, rendering assets in these jurisdictions unavailable to claimants. Not all are so protective over domestically-held assets though. Countries like France, for example, make it relatively straightforward to enforce a U.S. judgment against French-held assets.

But even so, awards like Burford’s can rarely be settled with a single asset. And chasing down bank accounts here, and properties there, to satisfy a massive award can prove costly and time consuming. It would be much easier for Burford to recover from Argentina if, hypothetically, the state of Argentina owned and exerted control over a chain of commercial hotels that all sat on valuable U.S. real estate. They don’t, to my knowledge. But it would be easier. Such a situation would eliminate both the jurisdictional barriers and the time required to track down dozens, if not hundreds of distinct assets.