Riz Mokal

Barrister

Current Position

Barrister
South Square
3/4 South Square
Gray's Inn
WC1R 5HP London
England

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7696 9900
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7696 9911
Email: rizmokal@southsquare.com

Class: XXX (2019)Circuit: International

Dr Riz Mokal is a barrister at South Square specialising in English and cross-border insolvency and restructuring, bank resolution, and the insolvency of financial institutions. His wider practice encompasses company, commercial, and trust law. He is an Honorary Professor in the UCL Faculty of Laws, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen School of Law, and a former Senior Counsel and Consulting Counsel at the World Bank. He joined South Square as an Academic Member in 2005 and entered full-time practice in 2016.

Riz’s work moves in a circuit. Cases generate questions that his research pursues; research equips him to address unsettled doctrinal, comparative, and regulatory issues; and analysis developed in scholarship and international standard-setting returns to courts as submissions and expert evidence.

Practice at the Bar and expert evidence

Riz was part of the successful appellant's counsel team in Drelle v Servis-Terminal LLC (2026), in which the UK Supreme Court held that an unrecognised and unregistrable foreign judgment may found an English bankruptcy petition. His recent appellate work also includes Petrofac, for supporting creditors, and Thames Water, where he appeared pro bono as part of the counsel team advancing public-interest submissions.

Other significant matters include Lehman Brothers International (Europe), Ocean Rig, Sova Capital, ipagoo, Beaufort, gategroup, and the Jersey désastre proceedings in which he acted for the Viscount of the Royal Court. Riz is frequently instructed by the Financial Conduct Authority in matters concerning distressed banks, investment firms, and electronic-money institutions.

Outside England, Riz acts as an expert witness on English and cross-border insolvency, company, commercial, and trust law. The US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York accepted his opinion and testimony on the Cape Town Convention in SAS AB. The Royal Court of Jersey and the Supreme Court of the State of New York have accepted opinions he co-authored on officeholder duties, derivative actions, and fiduciary duties. An opinion concerning the Selecta liability-management exercise has also been filed in the Netherlands Commercial Court of Appeal.

Practice, policy, and research

Cross-class cramdown

Riz co-led the four-country, European Commission-funded Contractualised Distress Resolution project and authored the Fairness chapter of its final report. Academic commentary traces provisions of the EU Preventive Restructuring Directive concerning relative priority and the relevant-alternative benchmark to that work.

In two articles on the Part 26A cramdown, Riz introduced the restructuring surplus into the analysis and developed a contribution-based framework for its fair allocation. He proposed relative priority as the starting point, with recoveries in the relevant alternative serving as a default proxy for relative contribution, subject to justified departures.

The English High Court expressly engaged with this analysis in Virgin Active, Houst, and Great Annual Savings. The High Court of Malaysia cited both articles and adopted their approach to fair distribution in KL Petrogas in 2026. Subsequent Court of Appeal decisions in Adler, Thames Water, and Petrofac have developed along materially similar lines.

Financial institutions in distress

While heading the World Bank’s Insolvency and Creditor/Debtor Regimes Initiative, Riz developed an analysis of the post-crisis treatment of financial contracts. That work contributed to the 2015 revision of the World Bank’s Principles for Effective Insolvency and Creditor/Debtor Regimes, which narrowed the recommended special insolvency treatment of financial contracts.

This policy experience connects with Riz’s work for the Financial Conduct Authority and other stakeholders in matters including Lehman Brothers, Beaufort, Reyker Securities, ipagoo, and Sova Capital. It also informs Financial Institutions in Distress: Recovery, Resolution, and Recognition, published by Oxford University Press in 2023, and his expert evidence concerning distressed financial institutions.

Characterisation and cross-border recognition

Riz was part of the successful plan company's counsel team in gategroup, where the High Court characterised a Part 26A restructuring plan as an insolvency proceeding for the purposes of the Lugano Convention. The submissions substantially accepted by the Court drew on an opinion Riz had co-authored with Professor Louise Gullifer.

Two days later, the High Court of Malaysia expressly relied on that opinion in AirAsia X when characterising a scheme of arrangement under the Cape Town Convention. The English High Court subsequently acknowledged the assistance derived from the Gullifer–Mokal analysis in Hong Kong Airlines. Riz and Professor Gullifer later revised the opinion for the Aviation Working Group, and Riz developed the analysis further in a 2022 article.

International law reform and standard-setting

As Senior Counsel at the World Bank from 2009 to 2013, and subsequently as Consulting Counsel until 2018, Riz worked with the governments of eighteen countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The work included policy analysis, legislative reform, and training for judges, regulators, insolvency practitioners, central bankers, and other stakeholders. He co-authored nine World Bank and IMF/World Bank country diagnostics.

Riz led the World Bank delegation to UNCITRAL from 2009 to 2013 and served as an independent expert member of the UK delegation from 2013 to 2017. He participated in developing the model laws on the recognition and enforcement of insolvency-related judgments and on enterprise-group insolvency, as well as the revised guidance on the Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency and the treatment of directors’ duties approaching insolvency. In 2018, the International Association of Insolvency Regulators commissioned him to draft its Principles for the Regulatory Regime for Insolvency Practitioners.

With seven co-authors, Riz developed a "modular approach" to micro, small, and medium enterprise insolvency, published as Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise Insolvency: A Modular Approach by Oxford University Press in 2018. The World Bank expressly credited the work with influencing the structure of its 2017 report and forming the foundation of much of two chapters. Its 2018 follow-up report also drew on the work, and both reports informed the MSE-specific provisions added to the World Bank’s Principles in 2021.

UNCITRAL devoted a section of a 2017 Working Group paper to the modular approach and recorded the Working Group’s interest in how it might contribute to the design of an effective MSME insolvency regime. Most of the approach’s substantive building blocks were subsequently reflected in the Legislative Recommendations adopted by UNCITRAL in July 2021. The work has also been cited in policy work at the OECD.

Scholarship and academic appointments

Riz completed his doctorate at UCL in 2002. His early scholarship includes “The Authentic Consent Model” and “Priority as Pathology: The Pari Passu Myth,” both published in 2001, and work on wrongful trading, secured-credit priority, and fairness and efficiency. His first book, Corporate Insolvency Law: Theory and Application, was published by Oxford University Press in 2005. Three co-authored volumes have followed.

His scholarship has been cited in appellate decisions of the House of Lords, the High Court of Australia, and the Courts of Appeal of England and Wales, New Zealand, Ontario, and Victoria. Riz held the Chair of Law and Legal Theory at UCL until 2016 and has also held appointments at Cambridge University’s Centre for Business Research and the University of Florence.

Riz is a Director of the International Insolvency Institute and a member of the World Bank’s Global Task Force on Insolvency and Creditor/Debtor Regimes, the Bowen Island Group, and the International Exchange of Experience on Insolvency Law.