China’s record year for bond defaults might feature one more superlative before the calendar turns: the first delinquency on an offshore security sold directly by a Chinese company, Bloomberg News reported. While Chinese dollar bonds have typically been issued via overseas units, some companies began direct sales three years ago. Among such issuers is Huachen Energy Co., which failed to make a coupon payment last week on its $500 million dollar bond due in 2020 governed by New York law -- though it has said it will make good on the amount by Dec. 18, within the grace period.

The Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has admitted and initiated insolvency proceedings against Mumbai-based Ariisto Developers and has appointed an interim resolution professional (IRP) to manage the company, The Economic Times reported. NCLT has asked other lenders to file their claims against Ariisto Developers by the first week of December.

An inquiry that has exposed rampant greed and wrongdoing in Australia’s major banks and wealth managers wraps up this week ahead of a final report which could trigger sweeping reform of the financial sector of the world’s 12-largest economy, Reuters reported. Dismissed initially as a “populist whinge” by the ruling conservative party, the quasi-judicial inquiry known as a Royal Commission has revealed branch-to-boardroom misconduct which will almost certainly trigger tougher regulation.

A banking liquidity crunch and weak business sentiment before state elections this year outweighed signs of a revival in consumer demand during India’s main festival season, keeping the outlook for the world’s fastest-growing major economy muted, Bloomberg News reported. An overall activity indicator measuring animal spirits -- a term coined by British economist John Maynard Keynes to refer to investors’ confidence in taking action -- was unchanged in October despite a slew of data from two-wheeler vehicle sales to consumer demand showing an improvement from the previous month.

China’s financing units for local governments, already grappling with bloated debts, now face an even bigger predicament -- a build-up of credit guarantees that leave them vulnerable to surging defaults, Bloomberg News reported. Around 2,000 of these platforms, known as local government financing vehicles, have offered a total of 7 trillion yuan ($1 trillion) of guarantees to loans, bonds and shadow financing for domestic companies, said Lv Pin, an analyst at CITIC Securities Co. That surpasses the tally of LGFVs’ own outstanding local bonds, Bloomberg-compiled data show.

The government is exploring the feasibility of implementing a so-called “pre-packaged” bankruptcy scheme, prevalent in countries like the US, in India to aid the existing insolvency framework and cut costs and time of the resolution process, The Financial Express reported. The planned scheme, if implemented, will be a “pre-IBC (Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code) window for the resolution of stressed assets, which will complement the existing framework and not substitute it,” corporate affairs secretary Injeti Srinivas told FE on Monday.

Steelmakers taking control of insolvent plants will result in greater capacity utilisation, triggering a “steep” hike in domestic demand of graphite electrodes, according to Ravi Jhunjhunwala, chairman and managing director of HEG Ltd,  BloombergQuint reported. “A lot of steel plants have changed hands recently and a lot are likely to change hands in the near future,” Jhunjhunwala told BloombergQuint.

A consortium of banks has applied to the debt recovery tribunal in Delhi seeking to enforce personal guarantees on the promoters of Videocon group, Venugopal Dhoot and his brother Rajkumar Dhoot. Videocon owes these banks Rs 20,000 crore, The Economic Times reported. An application by the State Bank of India that ET has reviewed said it was approaching the tribunal as the Dhoots did not respond to a guarantee invocation notice sent to them. The Dhoots had promised to personally repay the banks if their companies defaulted on the loans, according to the application.

Asia’s corporations, which are enjoying the lowest borrowing costs from the syndicated loan market since the global financial crisis, may soon see higher rates as default risks rise, according to bankers. Surging debt delinquencies in China and India are unnerving lenders and expectations of higher funding costs for banks linked to the London interbank offering rate will prompt them to finally pass some of that onto their clients, Bloomberg News reported.

India’s debt-laden Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) said on Monday it received more than a dozen expressions of interest for its stakes in subsidiaries IL&FS Securities Services, and ISSL Settlement & Transaction Services, Reuters reported. IL&FS, a major infrastructure financing and development company, earlier this month started work on plans to sell off assets, part of a wider restructuring of the group after it defaulted on some of its debt.