[6][7] The Ottoman government declared a sovereign default on its loan repayments with the Ramazan Kararnamesi (Decree of Ramadan) on 30 October 1875.
This made the European creditors bondholders, and assigned special rights to the OPDA for collecting various tax and customs revenues within the Ottoman Empire.
It would function as an independent arm of the Ottoman Bureaucracy, whose goal was to secure tax revenue to send back home to its citizen bondholders.
Other represented nations were Germany, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, as well as internal Ottoman bondholders.
[10] The actual size and scale of the Ottoman debt was difficult to calculate in the 19th century, and European creditors found themselves at a knowledge deficit.