Dr. Manuel A. Abdala is a Ph.D. in economics from Boston University and holds a Master of Arts in Political Economy from the same school. He is a Senior Managing Director with Compass Lexecon since 2011 and was previously a Director at LECG since 1998, where he acted as co-chair of its international arbitration practice group.

He has provided written and oral expert testimony in more than 190 disputes, many of them involving critical arbitration treaty disputes between private investors and governments on topics related to damage valuation, as well as opinions on government conduct vis-à-vis investors’ expectations and regulatory standards. He also has substantial experience in commercial arbitrations in shareholder disputes, competition clauses, property damages, and political risk insurance claims.

He has extensively published topics covering 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 a key economic advisor to Argentina’s Secretariat of Energy on the energy sector reform 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 Algeria, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Georgia, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Panama, 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.