The experience of creditors in Hong Kong who lent to firms doing business in
mainland China is similar- Hong Kong-based company liquidators are not
able to recover assets of Chinese companies that default on loans (Wall Street
Journal, August 25, 1999, p. A14.) More generally, very few debt defaults from
the Asian crisis of 1997}98 have resulted in investors receiving any liquidation
value. The Economist (January 30, 1999, p. 59) reports that “despite the creation
last year of a bankruptcy law in Indonesia where there had been none before, it
is still virtually impossible to force a defaulted debtor into liquidation (the few
creditors that have tried are still tangled up in legal appeals).a During the crisis,
Korean minority shareholders protested the transfer of resources out of large
firms, including Samsung Electronics and SK Telecom. Most collapses of banks
and firms in Russia after the devaluation of August 1998 were associated with
complete expropriation; creditors and minority shareholders got nothing
(Troika Dialog, 1999). Table 1 summarizes the details of leading allegations of
expropriation in countries affected by the Asian crisis. Note that in many of
these cases, controlling shareholders did not need to break any local laws in
order to expropriate from investors.