Profile

Dr. Manuel A. Abdala is a PhD in economics from Boston University and a Managing Director with Berkeley Research Group. He was previously a Senior Vice President with Compass Lexecon, and before that Director at LECG since 1998, where he was co-chair of its international arbitration practice group. He has provided written and oral expert testimony in more than 195 international arbitration cases, many of them involving treaty disputes between private investors and governments on topics related to damage valuation, as well as opinions on government conduct vis-a-vis investors' expectations and regulatory standards. He also has substantial experience in commercial arbitrations in shareholder disputes, property damages, and political risk insurance claims. He is currently a member of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration (ITA), the International Society of the New Institutional Economics (ISNIE) and has been engaged as guest professor at the International Arbitration Program in American University.

He has published extensively on topics covering infrastructure economic regulation, institutional design, utility privatization and valuation, industry structure, and competition policy. Dr. Abdala has completed projects on ex-post privatization analysis in several countries, including various research studies led by the World Bank. He has also served as key economic advisor to Argentina's Secretariat of Energy on the energy sector reform that took place in the 1990s. He has conducted numerous works and studies for private companies and public institutions related to business valuation, damage analysis, and regulatory analysis of infrastructure projects in several countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Russia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Practice Areas: Antitrust & Competition, Damages, Energy, International Arbitration, Regulatory Investigations, Valuation & Financial Analysis