An Emeritus Professor of Law, Dr. Bob Wessels is an expert advisor to the European Commission of the EU regarding matters of Bank and (International) Corporate Restructuring and Insolvency. He is also the Chairman of the Conference of European Restructuring and Insolvency Law (CERIL, independent legal think tank), and a Mediator at the INSOL International College of Mediation.

Dr. Wessels has 45 years of experience as an independent legal counsel, deputy justice, academic, advisor and arbitrator. For over 25 years, he served as a deputy justice in the Court of Appeal in The Hague. From 1988 to 2014, he was a professor of law at the Vrije University in Amsterdam and the University of Leiden. He has served as a Member of the Joint Board of Appeal of the three European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs; ESMA, EBA and EIOPA respectively); Arbitrator and Chair Standing arbitration committee Achmea (life- and pension insurance policy’s); Chair of the International working group to assist the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI) in its programme to renew U.S. Bankruptcy Code’s Chapter 11; Chairman of the Netherlands Association for Comparative and International Insolvency Law (NACIIL); Chairman of the Academic Forum of INSOL Europe; Member of the Ministry of Justice’s Committee to renew the Dutch Bankruptcy Act; Director of the Board of International Insolvency Institute.

On matters of business rescue and insolvency, Dr. Wessels served as consultant to IMF (Indonesia), World Bank (Georgia), the U.S. Federal Reserve System (Fed) and the Dutch Ministry of Justice.

He has been the first Commerzbank Visiting professor at the Institute for Law and Finance, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt (2003). Other visiting professorships included University of Pretoria (2004), St. John’s University, New York (2006–2011), Riga Graduate School of Law, Latvia (2008–2012). In 2011, he served as INSOL International Scholar for Europe, and in 2016 as External Scientific Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Procedural Law, Luxembourg.

Dr. Wessels is Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy. He has over hundreds of published articles in leading legal journals and has authored over thirty books, seven of which were written in English with professors, judges and insolvency practitioners from China, Germany, Spain, the UK and the USA. He is also the author of Wessels Insolventierecht (Wessels Insolvency Law), a 10 Volume series in Dutch, which started in 1999 and presently is in its 5th edition. Many of these projects were externally financed with sponsors such as, the American Law Institute, International Insolvency Institute, European Commission of the European Union, INSOL Europe, European Law Institute and Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.