Sovereigns

As part of the expansion of its work on recovery, Standard & Poor’s Rating Services introduced its sovereign recovery ratings methodology and assign recovery ratings to the debt of 25 speculative-grade sovereign issuers on 12 June 2007. Since then the total has grown to 29 and we plan to assign recovery ratings to the debt of further speculative-grade sovereigns that have outstanding foreign currency issues in global capital markets in the course of 2008. For other speculative-grade sovereigns, we will assign recovery ratings as and when they issue commercial debt.

The sovereign foreign currency recovery ratings reflect our opinion on the extent to which a sovereign government will be willing and able to repay creditors under one or more scenarios where there is a future default on commercial foreign currency debt obligations.

For more information contact:
Christan Esters: +49 (69) 33 999 242
David T. Beers: +44 (0) 20 7176 7101