Investors dismayed at being forced to accept a 20 percent principal writedown in a debt restructuring of Azerbaijan’s biggest bank were met with a warning that it may be shut down if creditors fail to back the plan, with the finance minister saying the lender never had the benefit of full sovereign guarantee, Bloomberg News reported. The International Bank of Azerbaijan proposed swapping $3.3 billion of its foreign-currency debt and deposits into a mix of new sovereign securities and the lender’s own bonds, according to a presentation in London on Tuesday.

Noble Group Ltd.’s crisis deepened on Tuesday after S&P Global Ratings flagged the risk that the embattled commodity trader may default on its debt, triggering a 36-minute plunge in the company’s shares, an exchange query, and a trading halt ahead of an announcement, Bloomberg News reported. “The negative outlook on Noble reflects the potential that the company will face distress and a non-payment of its debt obligations over the next 12 months,” S&P said in a statement late on Monday as it cut the company’s ratings by three steps to CCC+.

A troubled lender from Azerbaijan is shaping up to be a battleground for U.S. and European investors facing big losses on bondholdings. State-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan, or IBA, filed for bankruptcy in New York on May 11, battered by bad loans and the oil-price rout. It wants to restructure $3.3 billion of debt to help it get back on its feet, according to a proposal accompanying the bankruptcy filing, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The founder of LeEco, a Chinese Netflix-to-Tesla-like conglomerate, has stepped down as the CEO of the group's main listed unit, as the company begins to streamline and cut debt after rapid expansion led to a cash crunch, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Jia Yueting, who will remain as chairman and CEO of LeEco, envisions the group maintaining its separate unlisted automotive unit but rolling all other areas of business into Leshi Internet Information & Technology Corp Beijing, according to a transcript of his remarks to journalists on Sunday.

Indian central bank Deputy Governor Viral Acharya said injecting new funds into lenders won’t resolve the nation’s stressed asset plight until companies take steps to reduce debt, Bloomberg News reported. The Reserve Bank of India is seeking to strengthen the banking system through measures including merging weaker banks and pushing to privatize some state-run lenders as it ramps up efforts to resolve the world’s highest stressed-asset ratios. Banks would be happy to lend but there is no demand from corporates as they are heavily indebted, he said in a speech in Kolkata on Friday.

In a related story, the Financial Times reported that State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender, has reported earnings slightly ahead of analyst expectations for the first three months of 2017, along with a stabilisation of its hefty burden of bad loans. The bank’s net profit was Rs28.1bn ($430m) in the period, compared with a consensus forecast of Rs26.7bn by analysts polled by Bloomberg. This compared with Rs12.6bn in the same period of last year.

Investors betting Azerbaijan’s debt problems will be contained at the nation’s biggest bank could be in for a shock, Bloomberg News reported. Sovereign yields may jump 40 basis points next week as more details emerge about the International Bank of Azerbaijan’s plan to swap its defaulted debt into new sovereign notes, according to Raiffeisen Bank International AG. On Thursday, Moody’s Investors Service warned the restructuring was “credit negative” for the state oil champion, known as Socar, which keeps about 40 percent of its cash and equivalents at the defaulted lender.

For global investors and, indeed commentators, China remains a fascinating subject and one that carries a health warning, the Financial Times reported. Nearly a third of fund managers say the recent tightening of credit by authorities in Beijing, who are taking aim at the shadow banking sector, is now the biggest tail risk for markets, according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey released this week. Not since January of 2016 has China ranked above the threat of a eurozone break-up as the biggest worry for investors.

A mountain of bad debt in India's banking system has led to a prolonged credit crunch that is inflicting most pain on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) such as Pandey's that depend upon banks for their day-to-day working capital and longer-term borrowing needs. India has more than 45 million such enterprises, accounting for nearly 40 percent of gross domestic product, Reuters reported. Smaller businesses also account for the bulk of job creation, so a lack of bank credit reaching them threatens Prime Minister Narendra Modi's promise to create 250 million jobs over the next decade.

Tata Steel has agreed a settlement “in principle” to the long-running pensions saga at its UK business, a deal that could remove the last hurdle to a merger of the group’s European steelmaking operations with those of German rival ThyssenKrupp, the Financial Times reported. The £15bn British Steel Pension Scheme has been an increasing financial burden on Tata Steel UK, the country’s largest steelmaker, which its Indian parent acquired in 2007. The deal “in principle” would mean handing over £550m and a 33 per cent stake in the UK subsidiary to the retirement fund.