“He is a professor emeritus of insolvency law, an adviser to the European Commission, a founder of the International Insolvency Institute and the Conference on European Restructuring and Insolvency Law (CERIL), an expert on the renaissance painter Rembrandt and the holder of a Dutch chivalric order – as well as a long-time GRR columnist. The winner of our 2026 outstanding contribution award is, of course, Professor Dr Bob Wessels. Wessels will be presented with the award honouring his stellar, more than five decade-long career in business law at the GRR Awards 2026 on 4 November – the pinnacle of this year’s black-tie ceremony and dinner at the Pan Pacific Hotel in London.”
These are the words of Kyriaki Karadelis, Editor GRR / Global Restructuring Review, published November 2, 2026. On November 4, facing a group of over 200 insolvency and restructuring specialists, I was addressed with great regard and friendship by Simeon Gilchrist, a partner at Edwin Coe in London, and a UK council member of INSOL Europe. To provide some background on the award, the remainder of Kyriaki’s report from GRR follows below:
Having worn many hats – as an academic, a private practice lawyer, a judge, an arbitrator and an amateur historian – Wessels is internationally regarded as a leading authority on comparative and cross-border restructuring law, having published thousands of articles and books, and set up countless important research projects, organisations and initiatives on the subject.
As an adviser to the European Commission, he directly contributed to the development of the recast European Insolvency Regulation that came into effect in 2017, as well as the EU’s Preventive Frameworks Directive in 2019, and, most recently, the Directive to harmonise “certain aspects” of insolvency law, which came into force in March and has been the subject of several editions of his regular Europe Column in GRR.
He was also responsible for leading the development of the EU JudgeCo Principles and Guidelines in 2015, a set of guidelines to help cross-border insolvency case management in an EU context, which predated the Judicial Insolvency Network guidelines by a year. Three years earlier, as co-reporter with the late University College London professor Ian Fletcher, he developed another set of a cooperation principles, the ALI-III Global Principles.
Wessels also helped co-found the International Insolvency Institute (III) in 2000 and acted as a director of its board from 2004 to 2010, and set up CERIL as an independent think tank in 2016 to provide impartial advice on insolvency legislation across the EU and its individual member states, sitting as its first chair until 2023.
He has also been a bankruptcy law adviser to the Dutch Ministry of Justice, and a consultant to the IMF for Indonesia and to the World Bank for Georgia.
Wessel’s career trajectory began back in 1988, when he completed his doctorate and joined the Free University in Amsterdam as a professor of civil law. Always keeping a foothold in academia, he co-founded the Dutch-US firm HVG Law in 1993, now part of the EY Law network, and worked there four days a week until 2005.
From then on, he had his own independent practice acting as expert witness, legal counsel or arbitrator, not only in the Netherlands, but in courts and tribunals across Europe and the US, working on seminal cases like Lehman Brothers, Icesave/Landbanki following the Icelandic banking crisis, Fairfield Sentry related to the Madoff Ponzi scheme, and in proceedings concerning the collapsed ship fuel group OW Bunker, South Africa’s Steinhoff and Russian oil company Yukos, pending before courts in Texas and New York.
In between his private practice work, he found time to serve as a Deputy Justice at the Court of Appeal of The Hague from 1988 to 2016, and as a member of the joint Board of Appeal for three European financial supervisory authorities: the European Securities and Markets Authority, the European Banking Authority and the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority, until 2019.
But the work he is arguably most famous for is his academic work: in 2007, he joined Leiden University part-time, where he remains a professor emeritus of international insolvency law. He has also acted as a visiting professor to universities in Frankfurt, Pretoria, New York and Riga, as well as a visiting researcher to the Max Planck Institute for International European and Regulatory Procedural Law in Luxembourg.
Wessels has published prolifically, including an 11-volume book series in Dutch, “Wessels Insolventierecht”, which was first produced in 1999 and celebrated its fifth edition in 2022; and at least 10 books and reports in English. A year after founding CERIL, he and another founding member, Professor Stephan Madaus from the University of Halle-Wittenburg in Germany authored a report titled “Rescue of Business in Europe”, supported by the European Law Institute.
As well as his GRR column, he maintains a bilingual blog on international insolvency law.
As part of his academic work, Wessels has mentored hundreds of younger insolvency lawyers and academics and is credited with using his projects to promote diversity in the field. Aside from formally supervising 10 PhD students over the course of his career, he has trained judges and professionals in countries with developing insolvency regimes.
In 2016, he created a foundation, the Stichting Bob Wessels Insolvency Law Collection Foundation (BWILC), to donate his private insolvency law book collection to Leiden Law School’s Library. The foundation organises an annual two-day workshop for PhD students from Europe and beyond.
His collection was made available to all digitally in 2023, to coincide with Wessels receiving a Dutch royal order – Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau – for his contribution to the advancement of private law, and in particular insolvency law.
This summer, in a drive to modernise cross-border legal education, he presented an eight-part video series on the European Insolvency Regulation, backed by the Netherlands Association for Comparative and International Insolvency Law (NACIIL).
As well as CERIL and the III, Wessels has been a member of INSOL Europe since 2002 and was chair of its Academic Forum from 2007 to 2010. Before stepping down as chair, he set up a network within INSOL Europe for young researchers, the Younger Academics Network of Insolvency Law (YANIL).
He was also an early member of INSOL International, helping create its Global Insolvency Practice Course and acting as a senior lecturer on it from 2008; has been a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy since 2004; and founded the Advisory Committee on Comparative Law to provide input from 10 jurisdictions on adjustments to the US Bankruptcy Code.
Outside of his professional life, Wessels finds time to be a dedicated historian. In 2021, he published “Rembrandt’s Money”, a book on the legal and financial life of the renaissance artist, which he has followed up with a number of podcasts examining themes from the book.
He is a passionate ambassador for his hometown of Dordrecht and has been a volunteer and chairman of a 200-year-old literary society based there, Diversa sed Una, since the 1990s, helping it to publish an anthology of its history in 2016. During the covid-19 pandemic, he created three videos on the history of Dordrecht for YouTube.
Wessels will be attending the black-tie ceremony as a special guest with his wife Ingrid.
The night will also see awards presented in 18 other categories, celebrating the individuals, firms and matters that have left an impression on the cross-border restructuring and insolvency market over the past year.