Bio:

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 at the World Bank. He joined Chambers as an Academic Member in 2005 and entered full-time practice in 2016.

In his practice at the English Bar and his expert work outside England, Riz draws on academic research and international policy experience to address particularly demanding doctrinal, comparative, and regulatory questions. The questions arising in those matters in turn shape and refine his research and writing.  

One example is Riz’s work on cross-class cramdown in EU, English, and international restructuring law:

• The EU Preventive Restructuring Directive (EU) 2019/1023 adopted relative priority as the default rule in cramdown cases and the realistic alternative as one permitted best-interest benchmark. Academic commentary notes that these provisions were “substantially based on the work” of the European Commission-funded Contractualised Distress Resolution (CoDiRe) project. The provisions originate in the chapter on “Fairness” in the project’s final report. Riz co-led the four-country project and authored that chapter.  
• In two articles that built on the CoDiRe work, Riz introduced the concept of the restructuring surplus into the analysis of the restructuring plan under Part 26A of the UK Companies Act 2006. He developed a contribution-based framework for the fair allocation of such surplus, and argued that the alteration of existing rights is a form of contribution. He also proposed relative priority as the starting point, using relative recoveries in the relevant alternative as a default proxy for relative contribution, subject to justified departures for other restructuring-relevant considerations; see “The two conditions for the Part 26A cram down” (2020) 35(11) JIBFL 730 and “The court's discretion in relation to the Part 26A cram down” (2021) 36(1) JIBFL 12.
• The English High Court expressly engaged with Riz’s contribution-based analysis in Virgin Active (2021), Houst (2022), and Great Annual Savings Company (2023), while the English Court of Appeal, without citing the papers, treated creditors’ relative position in the relevant alternative as the presumptive starting point in Adler (2024), and recognised in Thames Water (2025) and Petrofac (2025) that the alteration of even out-of-the-money claims may itself constitute a contribution.
• Outside England, the High Court of Malaysia cited both of Riz’s articles in KL Petrogas [2026] MLJU 1663, the first reported Malaysian decision to interpret that country’s new cross-class cramdown provisions, and adopted the fair distribution approach they advocated.

A second example is Riz’s work on the insolvency of financial institutions and the intersection of insolvency law and financial regulation:

• The 2015 revision of the World Bank’s Principles for Effective Insolvency and Creditor/Debtor Regimes narrowed its recommendations for the special insolvency treatment of financial contracts under insolvency and bank resolution law. Riz developed an analysis of the post-crisis treatment of financial contracts while heading the World Bank’s Insolvency and Creditor/Debtor Regimes Initiative from 2009 to 2013. That analysis contributed to the process that culminated in the 2015 revision, and the World Bank credits him amongst those who helped “to generate, review and revise the Principles”.
• Riz now frequently advises and represents the UK's Financial Conduct Authority and other stakeholders, and has acted in relation to Allied Wallet, Beaufort, Dolfin Financial, Fyshe Horton Finney, ipagoo, Lehman Brothers, Reyker, and Sova Capital.
• This practical and policy experience feeds into Riz’s writing, including as a co-author of Financial Institutions in Distress: Recovery, Resolution, and Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). It also informs his expert evidence. For example, he has testified on Cayman Islands law in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in Silicon Valley Bank (2024-2025).

A third example is Riz’s work on the characterisation of restructuring proceedings for cross-border recognition and treaty purposes:

• In gategroup (2021), in which Riz appeared for the successful plan company with Felicity Toube QC, the English High Court characterised the restructuring plan proceeding as an insolvency proceeding for the purposes of the Lugano Convention. The submissions the Court substantially accepted drew on an analysis advanced in a November 2020 expert opinion Riz co-authored with Professor Louise Gullifer, Rouse Ball Professor of English Law at Cambridge University.
• Two days after the gategroup decision, the High Court of Malaysia in AirAsia X [2021] 10 MLJ 942 expressly relied on the Gullifer–Mokal opinion in holding that a scheme of arrangement deployed by an insolvent company is an “insolvency-related event” under the Cape Town Convention.
• In Hong Kong Airlines (2022), the English High Court expressly acknowledged the Gullifer–Mokal analysis as having been of “assistance” on a related Cape Town Convention issue.
• Riz has continued to develop these arguments, in a revised Gullifer–Mokal opinion for the Aviation Working Group (April 2021), and in “What is an insolvency proceeding? Gategroup lands in a gated community” (2022) 31 International Insolvency Review 418.

Riz’s academic writings have been cited by judges in a number of appellate decisions, including in the House of Lords (Spectrum [2005] UKHL 41); the High Court of Australia (Ansett [2008] HCA 3); and the Courts of Appeal of England and Wales (Sonatacus [2007] EWCA Civ 31), New Zealand (Strategic Finance [2013] NZCA 357), Ontario (Nortel 2015 ONCA 681), and Victoria (Ansett [2006] VSCA 242).

While at the World Bank, Riz worked with the governments of eighteen countries on insolvency and creditor/debtor reform. From 2009 to 2017, he also participated in UNCITRAL working groups developing international insolvency instruments, first as head of the World Bank delegation and subsequently as an independent expert member of the UK delegation.

He is a Director of the International Insolvency Institute, a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, and a member of the World Bank’s Global Insolvency Task Force, the Bowen Island Group, and the International Exchange of Experience on Insolvency Law. In August 2020, he was named amongst the 500 leading global restructuring and insolvency lawyers by Lawdragon.