It wasn’t so long ago that Suruga Bank Ltd. was seen as a model for how Japanese lenders can survive in an era of rock-bottom interest rates and weak loan demand. The regional bank was hailed for generating the best loan margins in the country, thanks to its focus on individual borrowers who were shunned by its risk-averse competitors. Now, Suruga has come unstuck for giving credit to investors in failed real estate investment projects, prompting Japan’s financial regulator to investigate the company’s lending practices, Bloomberg News reported.

Japanese equity funds posted their biggest net outflow since 2001 as investors regained their taste for risk assets in the past week and directed cash to emerging market equities and junk bonds, the Financial Times reported. The moves come as fears of a trade war eased and investors instead expressed optimism about strong earnings growth for US companies, which have begun reporting results for the first three months of the year.

Want to screw up a good law? Just try to make it a great one. That's what India did last November when it added a number of restrictions on who could bid for assets in a bankruptcy. The idea of the new regulations was to make it hard for errant owners to regain control of businesses without first settling their dues. But the morality was legal overkill; and that's now evident in the farce that the insolvency of Essar Steel India Ltd. has become, Bloomberg News reported in a commentary.

Bowing to criticism from the Singapore Exchange and other investors, embattled Noble Group is removing a provision in its $3.4 billion debt restructuring proposal that penalized shareholders voting against the plan, Reuters reported. The debt-for-equity swap is crucial for the survival of the Singapore-listed company, which has sold billions of dollars of assets, taken hefty writedowns and cut hundreds of jobs over the past three years to slash debt. Noble has secured the backing of its creditors, but it also needs approval from a majority of its shareholders.

Sweeping reforms to insolvency laws and regulations are set to benefit distressed companies that are attempting to negotiate a sale and avert going into administration, The Australian Financial Review reported. Local lawyers are of the view that draft regulations released this week by Minister for Revenue and Financial Services Kelly O'Dwyer are largely positive for lenders, struggling companies and the restructuring industry.

To many economists, the solution to India’s bad-loan crisis appears as obvious as the problem: Privatize state-owned banks, which have racked up billions more in soured loans and performed much worse than their private-sector counterparts. Yet, unless the government first strengthens its ability to supervise all banks, public and private, selling some of them off will be slim guarantee against another crisis, a Bloomberg View reported. One can understand the urge to privatize. A long-mooted bankruptcy law finally passed last year allows any single creditor to initiate the bankruptcy process.

Two Chinese groups have renewed their interest in buying a majority stake in National Insurance, Greece’s largest insurer, after a €718m sale agreed with Calamos-Exin, a US-Dutch partnership, collapsed last month, the Financial Times reported. Fosun Investment and Gonbao Investment, the second- and third-ranked bidders, “have returned to the reopened sale process” said one source close to the situation.

The world’s $164tn debt pile is bigger than at the height of the financial crisis a decade ago, the IMF has warned, sounding the alarm on excessive global borrowing, the Financial Times reported. The fund said the private and public sectors urgently needed to cut debt levels to improve the resilience of the global economy and provide greater firefighting capability if things went wrong. “Fiscal stimulus to support demand is no longer the priority,” the IMF said on Wednesday in a report published at its spring meetings in Washington.

Vedanta Ltd said on Tuesday it got approval from India's designated court for bankruptcy cases to acquire Electrosteel Steels Ltd. Electrosteel is the first to get approval from the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), among a dozen of the country's biggest loan defaulters which were pushed to bankruptcy proceedings last year, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. A Vedanta Ltd unit will buy debt-ridden Electrosteel for 18.05 billion rupees ($274.96 million) and provide additional funds worth 35.15 billion rupees, the company said in a statement.

Noble Group improved the terms of its controversial $3.4 billion debt restructuring deal and won the support of its biggest shareholder as the commodity trader seeks to complete the vital transaction, Reuters reported. Singapore-listed Noble’s debt-for-equity swap has already won the backing of more than 83 percent of the holders of its senior debt but it also needs a majority of its shareholders to approve the restructuring. “The revised structure granting shareholders 15 percent equity in New Noble has my full support,” Noble founder Richard Elman said in Noble’s statement on Monday.