Then, in 1999, Sheehan parlayed his expertise into an opportunity to make big money. He found out about an obscure 20-year-old loan that Romania had made to Zambia, which used the money to purchase $15 million worth of Romanian-made tractors, trucks, and police vehicles. (“It was a bad deal for us,” says David Ndopu, a top official in the Zambian Ministry of Finance. “The police vehicles broke down after six months and just sat around in parking lots.”) Zambia had been trying to negotiate with Romania for a partial forgiveness, but talks broke off in early 1999. That’s when Donegal stepped in. Its representatives persuaded Romania to sell them the debt at a deep discount—$3.3 million.

At that point, Donegal was holding what was basically worthless paper. Zambia had agreed in its original deal with Romania to ensure sovereign immunity, which it hoped would guarantee that the country couldn’t be sued or have its assets seized if it defaulted on the debt. But surprisingly—and fortunately for Donegal—Zambian officials waived that immunity in 2003, leaving the country open to litigation. Donegal’s objective, an insider insists, was to arrange debt-for-equity swaps that would reduce Zambia’s debt significantly in return for a chunk of local currency, which it would then invest in government-sponsored projects like textile mills and a national lottery, taking a share of the profits. It was only after several years of fruitless negotiation, the Donegal insider says, that the fund declared Zambia in default and sued for principal plus a quarter-century’s worth of interest—a whopping $55.5 million.

The April 2007 judgment in British High Court sided in part with Donegal, but the judge criticized Sheehan for being “not merely careless but cavalier in presenting his evidence” on the witness stand and suggested that some of Donegal’s tactics bore an appearance of impropriety. The court awarded the fund a partial victory: $15.5 million, plus only two-thirds of the $1.7 million in court costs it was seeking.

Debt-relief activists were outraged: Zambia is one of the world’s poorest countries. Watching Western investors make off with more than $15 million that could have been used to build schools or clinics struck many as deeply immoral. Last spring, activists besieged Sheehan’s company with so many angry emails and phone calls that its server and phone system were knocked out for weeks. A top executive there alleges that physical threats were also made against Sheehan and his staff.

A weary and wary Sheehan maintains that the media and the debt-relief movement have distorted the facts about his dealings with Zambia. “They knew Donegal’s mission was debt conversion,” he wrote in a December email, but “suppressed the information because it made us the perfect example of vultures attacking a really poor country.”

In Lusaka, Zambia’s dilapidated capital, I stop by the office of David Ndopu, who has closely followed the Donegal case. Faced with the aggressive pursuit and seizure of its assets, the Zambian government transferred $15 million—1 percent of its annual budget—to Donegal from a British bank account in October. “It was very painful,” Ndopu says.

But it is hard to see how Zambia’s increased financial burden is going to make things worse for the average Zambian. Musonda Kapena, who runs a humanitarian-aid agency in the countryside north of Lusaka, tells me that so little money is reaching rural Zambia—where most of the population lives—that $15 million more would hardly make a difference. In August 2006, as schools were desperately trying to obtain a few more pieces of chalk for their blackboards, Zambia paid $7 million for its president, Levy Mwanawasa (who is still in power), to lease an Italian-­made twin-turbine AB-139 Agusta helicopter.