India announced a fiscal first-half borrowing plan largely in line with expectations, a move likely to comfort a bond market facing near-record debt sales, Bloomberg News reported. The government will auction 7.24 trillion rupees ($99 billion) of bonds in the six months to September, or about 60% of the full-year target, Economic Affairs Secretary Tarun Bajaj said on Wednesday. That compares with 60% to 65% of total debt the government usually issues for the period.

Engineering and construction firm Punj Lloyd is heading towards liquidation as the company''s lenders have rejected a resolution plan, the Times of India reported. The company is undergoing resolution process under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). During its last meeting held on March 30, the lenders did not approve the resolution plan, the company said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday. The company's Committee of Creditors (CoC) failed to select a bidder for the company within the mandated time frame under the IBC.

China’s economic recovery picked up a surprising amount of steam in March, boosted by strong domestic consumption and unquenchable foreign demand for Chinese-made goods, the Wall Street Journal reported. The country’s official manufacturing purchasing managers index, a gauge of factory activity, hit a three-month high of 51.9 in March, topping February’s reading of 50.6 with the 50 mark separating expansion from contraction, according to data released Wednesday by the National Bureau of Statistics.

The brokerage arm of Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group on Tuesday flagged potential losses of around $300 million at its European subsidiary related to an unnamed U.S. client, Reuters reported. The potential loss does not have any material impact on the business capability of the securities arm, or its European unit, Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Holdings Co Ltd said in a statement. It did not name the U.S. client. However, the revelation comes after global banks, including rival Nomura Holdings, were bracing for the fall-out from the downfall of hedge fund Archegos Capital.

The coming weeks in Australia could bring on the biggest economic shock since the pandemic itself, with the end of the $90 billion JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme, ABC.net.au reported. Business owners, bureaucrats and insolvency experts are cautiously awaiting the fallout. Insolvency laws were essentially placed on hold during the pandemic, due to the rolling uncertainty and how difficult it was to predict future business. As a result, the number of companies winding up halved in 2020, despite Australia being in its first recession in three decades.

Lim Oon Kuin, the founder of collapsed oil trading firm Hin Leong Trading Pte Ltd, is expected to face another 23 charges of forgery-related offences soon, Singapore’s prosecution said, Reuters reported. The 23 charges are expected to be tendered on April 8, Deputy Public Prosecutor Navin Naidu told a Singapore court on Monday. The Singapore Attorney-General’s Chambers confirmed the prosecutor’s comments. Last year, Singapore police charged the 78-year-old former oil tycoon, better known as O.K. Lim, with two counts of abetment of forgery for the purpose of cheating. Owned by O.K.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. joined a growing list of global financial firms to take a hit from the forced unwinding of bets by Bill Hwang’s Archegos Capital Management in one of the biggest margin calls of all time, Bloomberg News reported. Japan’s largest bank warned of a potential $300 million loss related to a U.S. client, a hit that’s linked to Archegos. Lenders are just starting to tally the carnage stemming from the liquidation of more than $20 billion of positions linked to Hwang’s New York-based family office, which has roiled stocks from Baidu Inc. to ViacomCBS Inc.

Indian shares rose on Tuesday, lifted by gains in bank shares after steel conglomerate JSW Steel completed an insolvency process, allowing lenders to recover some of their bad loans, Reuters reported. JSW Steel said on Friday that it completed a resolution plan for Bhushan Steel and Power, including a payment of 193.50 billion rupees ($2.66 billion) to financial creditors. “The JSW Steel resolution has given impetus to the banks as many of them were lenders to the bankrupt company,” said Anita Gandhi, director at Arihant Capital Markets.

Pakistan is selling a $2.5 billion dollar bond that will be a key test of investor sentiment after the resumption of a $6 billion bailout program with the International Monetary Fund, Bloomberg News reported. The South Asian nation is offering the notes in three parts, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak about it. The debt deal comes amid a flurry of developments in recent days, as Pakistan’s economy grapples with continued fallout from the pandemic.