Ratings agency Moody’s has downgraded Noble Group further into junk territory on Monday, warning that the embattled commodity trader may not have enough cash and bank lines be able to cover debts maturing in the next 12 months. Noble Group, whose shares have plummeted by 56 per cent in the past week, was lowered to Caa1 from B2 by Moody’s, placing it in a category the rating’s agency describes as “subject to very high default risk,“ the Financial Times reported.

Toshiba, whose U.S. nuclear unit Westinghouse has filed for bankruptcy protection, is reporting a 950 billion yen ($8.4 billion) net loss for the fiscal year ended March, Bloomberg News reported on an Associated Press story. The Japanese electronics giant's results have failed to win auditors' approval from the previous quarter, after questions were raised over the acquisition of U.S. nuclear construction company CB&I Stone and Webster. Tokyo-based Toshiba Corp.

India’s finance minister Arun Jaitley was in bullish form last week, touting the government’s move to give the central bank powers to force action by lenders on distressed loans, the Financial Times reported. This would be key to fixing the huge bad debt burden weighing on India’s state-owned banks, which stemmed largely from just a few dozen big corporate accounts, he told a conference in Tokyo. “To resolve between 30 and 50 accounts is not very difficult, if the [Reserve Bank of India] is empowered to give direction to the banks,” he said.

Indian conglomerate Piramal Enterprises said it is looking to expand its real estate development business and also expects to have a licence to start providing home mortgages by July. The Mumbai-based group, whose interests range from pharmaceuticals to financial services and real estate financing in India's big cities, said it now plans to finance top property developments in second-tier cities, Reuters reported.

International Bank of Azerbaijan, the energy exporting country's biggest lender, said on Friday it needed to restructure more than $3 billion of its debt, most owed to foreign creditors, to tackle bad loans left over from the slump in oil prices, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The state-controlled bank announced on Thursday it was suspending payments on some liabilities and seeking creditors' support for restructuring. The news sent IBA's dollar-denominated bond tumbling to its lowest level in over a year.

The yield on Chinese five-year government bonds hit its highest since 2014 on Friday, as tight liquidity and a regulatory crackdown on leveraged investment caused a rarely seen inversion of the yield curve, the Financial Times reported.

The largest bank in Azerbaijan has halted its foreign debt payments and will start restructuring negotiations with creditors after a currency crisis in the Caspian Sea nation drove the lender to the brink of collapse, Bloomberg News reported. The International Bank of Azerbaijan missed a principal and interest payment on a $100 million subordinated loan on May 10, according to an emailed statement from the government-owned lender on Thursday.

There's growing evidence that China is finally scaling back its epic borrowing binge. That's important for a lot of reasons, not least for reducing risk and avoiding a financial crisis, a Bloomberg View reported. The question is whether the government can sustain the pain. Regulators in Beijing are well aware of the risks that excessive leverage poses, and have tried many times over the years to crack down. Yet they routinely fail to rein in local government officials who get promoted by boosting economic growth, regardless of what systemic risks they may be incurring by binging on debt.

In a major setback for Deccan Chronicle Holdings Ltd (DCHL), public sector bank Canara Bank has filed an insolvency petition against the beleaguered city-based company before the Hyderabad bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) by invoking the provisions of the country's newly ushered in Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), the Economic Times reported.

PwC advised Property Ventures (PVL) on ways to continue trading when by some accounts it was insolvent while at the same time giving David Henderson's failed property development company a clean bill of health as statutory auditor, the liquidators allege, The New Zealand Herald reported. Liquidator Robert Walker alleges that if not for PwC, the company would have been wound up in 2007, allowing loans to be called in, asset sales and a more orderly liquidation. Instead it trundled on until 2010, when it failed owing $69 million and was later put into liquidation.