Dr Riz Mokal

Bio:

Riz Mokal is a barrister at South Square Chambers in London, UK. His practice extends to all aspects of domestic and cross-border insolvency, restructuring, bank resolution, and trust law, with a particular focus on matters involving complex policy considerations.

From 2009 to 2013, Riz served as Senior Counsel to the World Bank and Head of the Bank’s Global Initiative on Insolvency and Creditor/Debtor Regimes. In this capacity, and subsequently as a Consulting Counsel to the Bank, Riz has worked with the governments of some twenty countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East on reform of insolvency and creditor/debtor systems. His work involved policy analyses of existing laws and practices, the development of new legislation, and the training of judges, lawyers, insolvency practitioners, central bankers, and other stakeholders.

Riz has a doctorate from University College London and a BCL Honours from Oxford University. He held the Chair of Law and Legal Theory at University College London until 2016, is currently an Honorary Professor there and an Associate Member of the Aberdeen University School of Law. Amongst the academic positions he has previously held are a Visiting Professorship at the University of Florence and a research position at Cambridge University. His scholarship — which ranges over financial sector regulation, insolvency, property and trusts, and legal theory — has influenced law reform in the UK and the EU, and has been cited with approval by several courts, including the House of Lords, the Australian High Court, the Courts of Appeal of England & Wales, New Zealand, Ontario, and Victoria, and the High Court of England & Wales.

As leader of the World Bank’s delegation to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law for many years and then as member of the UK delegation, he was part of the group that authored the UNCITRAL model laws on the enforcement of insolvency-related judgments and on the cross-border insolvency of enterprise groups, as well as the revised guide to interpretation of the extant Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency and the Legislative Guide treatment of directors’ duties in the period approaching insolvency.

He is a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, and a member of the World Bank’s Global Insolvency Task Force, the International Insolvency Institute, the Bowen Island Group, and the International Exchange of Experience on Insolvency Law. In August 2020, he was named amongst the 500 leading global restructuring and insolvency lawyers by Lawdragon.