When Eddie Middleton and Tiffany Wong worked on the liquidation of Lehman Brothers’ vast Asian operations, it must have seemed like the largest and most complicated task they would ever take on.
Fifteen years later, China Evergrande, the world’s most indebted property developer, has collapsed — and they are handling the wreckage.
The pair, from US firm Alvarez & Marsal, have already started making preparations for a possible lawsuit against PwC, Evergrande’s former auditor, after a judge appointed them as liquidators of Evergrande’s Hong Kong-listed holding company. Still they face a completely different challenge to the one they had when sharing out the spoils of the Wall Street bank.