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| Best Sovereign Adviser: HSBC |
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| Also nominated: Lazard and Deutsche Bank |
Banks have a big role to play in helping troubled sovereigns find a way through the debt crisis. Lazard played a prominent part in advising Greece on its restructuring of private-sector debts this year, while Deutsche represented bondholders.
Behind the scenes, HSBC also advised Greece. "We had been engaged with Greece for several years, since our time as a leading primary dealer, conducting small liability management exercises for them, and were advising them very early on that some form of larger scale debt re-profiling was needed," says Spencer Lake, co-head global markets at HSBC. "We were at the centre of negotiations on PSI1, that then led to PSI2, and were able to help with insights as a leading participant in government bond markets and as having globally a leading liability management platform for private and public sector clients." He says: "It had become clear that Greece will have to go through a comprehensive debt restructuring eventually, and the PSI conducted earlier this year was a bridge to that which successfully avoided a hard default.