Moody’s blamed for Bolshevik bond renunciation

The French Association of Russian Bondholders (or AFPER) is unhappy that the government of the Soviet Union repudiated the debts of its czarist predecessor, leaving it (or, more accurately, its members’ predecessors) with worthless paper. So in an interesting inversion of causality, in June 2001 it misguidedly sued Moody’s and S&P for providing ratings to […]

The French Association of Russian Bondholders (or AFPER) is unhappy that the government of the Soviet Union repudiated the debts of its czarist predecessor, leaving it (or, more accurately, its members’ predecessors) with worthless paper. So in an interesting inversion of causality, in June 2001 it misguidedly sued Moody’s and S&P for providing ratings to the debt of the new post-Soviet Russian government in 1996, and sought to hold the rating companies liable for the debts of the earlier iterations of the Russian government. A Paris court finally got around to throwing the case out today. (Reuters, April 6).

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