But. Odious debts don't just happen to happen from time to time. Somebody has to agree to borrow the money.

So it is clearly a necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) condition for repudiating debt as odious that somebody in the defaulting country goes to prison. In the case of countries emerging from colonial or otherwise repressive governments, it is fairly simple to tell who needs to go to prison: The dictator or colonial magistrate, sometimes his family, usually a number of military people too.

In the case of a country that has been shock therapied by the IMF, it is less clear who needs to go to prison. But the people who precipitated the crisis that caused the IMF to bail out foreign lenders seem like good candidates. And the politicians who signed up for the IMF programme should arguably serve some time too.