Even before the body of coffee-chain tycoon V.G. Siddhartha was recovered from a river in southern India this week, the financial strains that appear to have led him to take his own life were beginning to emerge, Bloomberg News reported. A letter purportedly written and signed by Siddhartha and sent to senior management of Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd. laid out in stark words his struggles with a “serious liquidity crunch” that in turn had led to “tremendous pressure” from lenders and an unnamed private-equity investor. “I would like to say I gave it my all,” Siddhartha wrote.

Lok Sabha on Thursday passed amendments to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, with the government asserting that the spirit behind the law is not to allow companies to die, India Today reported. Rajya Sabha has already passed the bill and with its passage in the lower house, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code is set to be amended. Responding to the debate on the bill, Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the liquidation of a company is not the sole agenda of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. As many as seven sections of the Code are to be amended.

China onshore corporate bond defaults reached at least 14.4 billion yuan ($2.1 billion) from 14 notes in July, the highest level since the March peak, Bloomberg News reported. This brings the total year-to-date defaults to 70.9 billion yuan from 89 bonds. Real estate sector with 10.2b yuan defaults tops year-to-date default list, followed by wholesale (9.5b yuan) and retail sales sector (7.9b yuan). Investment companies topped last month’s defaults, accounting for 45% of monthly total amount. Jiangsu, Anhui provinces and Shanghai City were among the top 3 default locations.

One of Asia’s best bond rallies is bolstering Indian banks’ efforts to accelerate clean-up of the world’s worst bad-loan pile, Bloomberg News reported. The benchmark 10-year sovereign bond yield dropped about 50 basis points in July, extending the past year’s decline to more than 130 basis points. Each basis point fall in the yield adds 3.5 billion rupees ($50 million) to banks’ treasury gains, boosting their ability to writedown bad loans, estimates by ICRA Ltd. show.

Turkey is leaving banks to sort out the restructuring of debt by themselves. With half of 400 billion lira ($72 billion) of troubled loans in the country already reorganized, the government won’t cover any losses incurred from bad loans, Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak told reporters in the capital, Ankara, Bloomberg News reported. The economy will be better off once the balance has been dealt with, he said. “The level of success depends on them,” the minister said. “Some say ‘government should cover losses’ -- that won’t happen.

A consortium of lenders, led by Syndicate Bank, is set to agree to a restructuring scheme for Reliance Infrastructure Ltd.’s Mumbai Metro project, two people in the know told BloombergQuint on condition of anonymity, BloombergQuint reported. The restructuring plan involves extending the tenure of the Rs 2,200 crore in outstanding loans by two years, the people quoted above said. In addition, lenders will likely agree to a cut in interest rates to around 9 percent from over 11 percent currently, which will help the metro project repay its dues on time, the people said.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is the "last hope" for Africa's most advanced economy, but his government must turn incentive policies into laws to secure more Chinese investment, a senior Chinese diplomat told Reuters, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. China is South Africa's largest trading partner and has pledged more investment than any other country since Ramaphosa embarked on a drive last year to attract $100 billion of new investment to lift the economy out of a slump.

When a lender suffers from a run on deposits or a funding crisis, one solution is a central-bank takeover. The People’s Bank of China, however, is finding that option has shut, a Bloomberg View reported. Two months after the PBOC seized Baoshang Bank Co., China’s first such move in two decades, regulators have another troubled situation on their hands. On Sunday, Bank of Jinzhou Co., a small regional lender in the rust belt province of Liaoning, got a partial bailout from three state-owned asset managers.

A unit of Reliance Communications Ltd., tycoon Anil Ambani’s distressed telecom firm, is seeking an extension from holders of its dollar-denominated bonds maturing Aug. 1, the company’s spokesman said, Bloomberg News reported. Global Cloud Xchange is in discussions with holders of its 7% $350 million notes for a deal that would provide the issuer more time to discuss options on the maturity of the senior secured notes, the spokesman said in a statement.

Turkey’s central bank slashed its benchmark interest rate on Thursday, marking a shift in direction after the sacking of its former governor by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Financial Times reported.