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Hedge fund investors, furious at having their bond holdings in Portugal’s Banco Espírito Santo written down to zero, are weighing a legal action against Portuguese regulators.

According to bankers and lawyers involved in the effort, the funds include Daniel S. Loeb’s Third Point and GLG in London and smaller outfits that specialize in distressed bonds like Aurelius, Golden Tree and VR Global.

Among the largest investors who incurred losses in the bonds are EJF Capital, a fund based in Arlington, Va., and the London-based asset management unit of BTG Pactual, the Brazilian investment bank.

All the firms declined to comment.

The bonds in question were an especially risky variety of junior debt securities that Banco Espírito Santo issued late last year.

Holders of these high-risk bonds have been assigned to the so-called bad bank it recently set up, which houses around 4 billion euros, or $5.36 billion, of nonperforming loans that the bank made to its struggling group companies.

These toxic loans were at the root of the bank’s surprising collapse late last month.

The good bank, which the government hopes to sell off to foreign investors at some point, has taken ownership of €58 billion of loans deemed to be in better condition.

The episode highlights the extent to which rock-bottom interest rates in the United States have pushed many investors to make risky bets on high-yielding bank and government bonds in Portugal and Greece.

For more than a year, these investments have reaped rich returns. But as worries build about Europe’s ability to grow and the ability of its banks to withstand increasingly bad loans, many of these highflying stocks and bonds have reversed direction.

The investor group claims that some faulty loans made by Banco Espírito Santo’s banking subsidiary in Angola, Banco Espírito Santo Angola, have gone to the good bank and not the bad bank where they rightly belong.

They argue that this book of around €3.3 billion in questionable loans will improve in value over time because the creditors include powerful members of Angola’s political and economic elite. And they say that Portuguese regulators have steered these assets to the good bank so as to increase its value — assuming that the loans get bumped up in value.

While the group has had initial discussions with lawyers at White & Case about a legal strategy, legal experts suggest that a court challenge faces long odds. European officials have made it clear for several years now that investors who speculate in the risky junior bonds of troubled banks will receive little sympathy if the bank actually fails.

Furthermore, any court action fought in slow-moving Portuguese courts might take years to find a resolution.

Traders say that many of the junior bond investors were buying these bonds in the middle of last month, as they plunged to 80 cents on the dollar as fears mounted over the health of the large Portuguese lender.

Convinced that the bank would either be able to raise the extra funds needed or get bailed out by the government, these funds piled into the securities in the hope that they could secure a quick 20 percent on their investment.

When the bank reported larger-than-expected losses, the central bank stepped in, creating a good bank to be sold off at a future date and a bad bank holding the non performing loans.

While bank depositors and senior bondholders were protected, stock investors and junior debt owners were not.

The bonds currently trade at 14 cents on the dollar.