Alison Frankel

Distressed debt investors don’t have much credence as victims. These are, after all, hedge funds that buy up bonds in or near default, typically at a steep discount, in the hope they’ll be able to boost the value of the debt through the bankruptcy process or litigation in U.S. courts. Right now, for instance, distressed bond funds are preparing for battle over billions of dollars worth of Greek sovereign debt that they snatched up in anticipation of that country’s default in March. Distressed debt funds quite literally feed off the flesh of moribund companies and foreign economies, which is why they’re frequently called vulture funds. Vultures flanked by crafty lawyers aren’t entitled to a whole lot of sympathy.

But they earned some from me when I read the Justice Department’s new amicus brief, filed last week at the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in the long-running battle between The Republic of Argentina and NML Capital, Aurelius, and other holders of defaulted Argentine bonds. The brief suggests that the Justice Department believes the foreign policy objectives of the executive branch trump the obligations of a foreign sovereign to comply with U.S. court directives. That’s an argument the government clearly feels conflicted about, based on the brief. And its support of Argentina, at the expense of the power of the U.S. court system, could roil the vulture-dominated secondary market for distressed sovereign debt in the midst of the Eurozone crisis.

Usually, the United States wouldn’t get involved in a dispute over contract interpretation, which is at the heart of the cases at the 2nd Circuit. But the Justice Department believes Argentina’s appeal implicates a “cornerstone” foreign economic policy. Last December, U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa of federal court in Manhattan issued a series of orders in various bondholder cases against Argentina concluding that under the standard contract provision known as pari passu (or “equal footing”), Argentina must pay the vulture funds in full before making payments to investors who agreed to participate in two rounds of restructurings that followed Argentina’s 2002 bond default. In February, Griesa issued injunctions based on those orders, which meant that Argentina could not make any payment to investors who were issued new debt in the 2005 and 2010 restructurings until it paid the holdouts everything it owes them.

Those injunctions, according to the Justice Department, are based on a misreading of pari passu precedent that endows holdout investors with too much power and interferes with the ability of sovereign nations to restructure their debt. The amicus brief, as well as Argentina’s appellate brief, argued that Griesa’s ruling offers investors little reason to participate in a foreign sovereign’s efforts to resolve its debt crisis — and every incentive to disrupt restructuring for their own selfish purposes:

The district court’s interpretation of the pari passu provision could enable a single creditor to thwart the implementation of an internationally supported restructuring plan, and thereby undermine the decades of effort the United States has expended to encourage a system of cooperative resolution of sovereign debt crises.

For vulture funds holding defaulted Argentinean bonds, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has been a brick wall with only the tiniest of chinks. In recent years, the appellate court has rejected all sorts of clever stratagems the bondholders and their lawyers have dreamed up in an effort to get their hands on Argentine assets, including an attempt to attach assets belonging to Argentina’s central bank and pension system.

One notable exception to the rule of bondholder frustration at the Second Circuit was the appellate court’s 2006 ruling that a holder called Capital Ventures International had the right to attach Argentine collateral (in the form of U.S. and German government securities) held by the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. Argentina put up the securities to back its 1992 issuance of so-called “Brady bonds,” which, under a plan pushed by then-Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, exchanged $28.5 billion in defaulted bonds for collateralized Brady bonds due in 2023. The Second Circuit’s 2006 ruling meant that if Argentina attempted to restructure or exchange the Brady bonds before their 2023 maturity, CVI was first in line to get its hand on the securities held at the Fed.

There was just one big problem with the 2006 appellate ruling for CVI and its lawyers at Ballard Spahr and Cozen O’Connor: it came too late. By the time the Second Circuit overturned a lower court ruling and granted CVI a right to the Fed-held collateral, Argentina had already completed an exchange of $2.8 billion in Brady bonds. Because CVI only had a right to the collateral at the Fed if Argentina was engaged in a Brady bond exchange, CVI was out of luck, despite its appellate win. CVI was left holding a big-money judgment against Argentina — more than $200 million in CVI’s case — with no foreseeable way to collect on it.