In recent months, Ukrainian government officials have been crisscrossing the globe, asking Ukraine’s creditors for relief on $23 billion in debt the country says it can’t pay. Without relief, Ukraine’s economy could sink into the financial void. That puts Michael Hasenstab, the boy wonder of distressed debt management, front and center in a financial crisis that could determine the fate of a country Russian President Vladimir Putin covets with eager eyes.Hasenstab, 42, represents the investment firm Franklin Templeton as one of the four members on the Ad-hoc Committee of Bondholders to Ukraine, a panel of representatives from three U.S. mutual funds and one Brazilian bank. The debt-holders have to decide whether they will acquiesce to Ukraine’s demands and allow it to pay 40 percent less than it owes. As the largest holder of Kiev’s debt, Hasenstab, chief investment officer of Templeton Global Macro, stands to lose billions of dollars if that occurs.
Ukraine is in desperate need of economic growth, something it has been severely lacking in recent years. Investors have been spooked away by the continuing civil war with Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east, as well as by years of endemic government corruption.
More at the link