Aimilios AVGOULEAS (Practice of Corporate Finance and the Law)
Visiting Professor
Visiting Period : 8 August 2016 to 26 August 2016

Professor Aimilios Avgouleas is the inaugural holder of the International Banking Law and Finance Chair at the University of Edinburgh, and the founding director of the Edinburgh LLM in International Banking Law and Finance. Emilios is a Member the Stakeholder Group of the European Banking Authority (EBA) selected in the (so-called) 'top-ranking' academics section and appointed as an independent member the ESM/ECB/Eurogroup select panel for the selection/evaluation of the board of the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund.

Before joining the academic world Emilios practised extensively in the field of global markets including with Clifford Chance as an associate and Linklaters as a managing associate. He is among the world's foremost experts in law and finance, banking and financial markets regulation, global financial governance and behavioural law and finance. He has published extensively in these areas including two research monographs: The Mechanics and Regulation of Market Abuse (OUP 2005) and Governance of Global Financial Markets (CUP 2012) and a plethora of extensively cited articles. Recently he co-authored the 3rd edition of Oxford's Principles of Banking Law (2016) and he co-authored and co-edited the Cambridge collection: Reconceptualsing Global Finance and its Regulation (2016). Emilios has held a number of visiting academic posts with leading universities more recently as senior research scholar at Yale Law School. He will be a visiting professorial fellow at Harvard Law School in the fall.

Following the near collapse of the biggest western banks in the period of 2008-2009 and the ensuing offers of public support (bailouts) to avoid the liquidation of these institutions and the systemic threats that would go with it the world's biggest jurisdictions have grappled with the issue of the the Too-Big-To-Fail institution (TBTF). To this effect the USA through the Orderly Liquidation Authority Section of the the Dodd-Frank Act and the EU by means of the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) have built robust bank resolution regimes. These regimes are guided in part by the Financial Stability Board's "Key Attributes for Effective Resolution". The guiding principles of the new resolution regimes are facilitation of orderly failure in order to mitigate the TBTF effect, alongside structural reforms, and avoidance of bailouts which in some sense amount to a public subsidy to the banking sector. The key legal device invented to force banks to internalize the costs of their failures are so-called bail-in provisions under which any excess bank losses are absorbed by bank creditors (bondholders and uninsured depositors) rather than the public purse. But key challenges remain. First cross-border bank resolution is a fiendishly complex exercise with the important question of who provides liquidity to the group or the parts of it under resolution virtually unanswered. Secondly, the bail-in regimes are untested in terms of systemic consequences, raise important legal questions, and their effectiveness when it comes to loss absorption remains questionable. This lecture will present the main features of the new regimes and the magnitude of remaining bank resolution challenges and will in turn consider each of the key resolution questions. In this context the lecture will attempt to offer comprehensive answers including in cross-border context.