The vultures

On average, equity partners at Allen & Overy earn over £1m a year. Meanwhile, 80% of Zambia’s population subsist on less than a dollar a day. These are two disparate worlds that rarely converge, but at London’s High Court recently they collided in dramatic style.

Over the past year, London’s Royal Courts of Justice have played host to a grim struggle between Donegal International, a so-called ‘vulture fund’, and the Republic of Zambia – one of the world’s most heavily indebted nations. Vulture funds are financial organisations that specialise in buying securities in distressed environments, such as equities that are in or near bankruptcy. As the name suggests, they circle over rapidly weakening companies or, in the case of sovereign debt, a developing country such as Zambia, waiting to pick over their remains.

Double standards?

Recently, Guy Beringer, A&O’s senior partner, has made some very strong statements, rejecting profits per partner as the sole measure by which law firms should be judged. Beringer is keen that raw commercialism be tempered with corporate social responsibility. Indeed, profitable as it is, A&O is also a founder member of a progressive organisation called Advocates for International Development (A4ID). Chris Marshall, pro bono and community support officer at Reed Smith Richards Butler, is chairman of A4ID’s board of directors. At the launch of A4ID in October last year, Marshall proudly announced that its work would be focused ‘around the core of the Millennium Development Goals’. These include eradication of poverty and hunger, the achievement of universal primary education, and the reduction of child mortality.

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