The bankruptcy of Toshiba Corp's U.S. unit Westinghouse Electric Co will have no negative impact on the finances of its minority shareholder Kazatomprom, the Kazakh uranium miner said on Wednesday. Kazatomprom said in a statement that it held a put option that would allow the firm to sell its entire 10 percent stake in Westinghouse back to Toshiba at the price of the original purchase, Reuters reported. Kazatomprom, which paid $540 million for the stake in 2007, did not explicitly say whether it would execute the option.

Investors are becoming more discerning when it comes to the origin of Chinese debt, Bloomberg News reported. China saw its worst start to a year on record for corporate defaults, with companies headquartered in two eastern provinces -- Liaoning and Shandong -- responsible for the lion’s share. Money managers are taking notice, with a run of messy, high-profile company scandals helping sour sentiment toward certain regions. Beijing’s de-leveraging drive, which has been ramped up this month and has boosted borrowing costs, is also a factor.

Executives at Kaisa Group Holdings, the first Chinese property developer to default on an overseas bond, have had a busy few weeks, the Financial Times reported. Since trading of the company’s Hong Kong-listed shares resumed on March 27 after a two-year suspension, they have belatedly issued Kaisa’s 2014 and 2015 annual reports, interim reports for 2015 and 2016, and unaudited operating figures for the first quarter of 2017. Adding to the sense that it is finally business as usual at Kaisa, the company’s shares surged 85 per cent on their first day of trading.

China's debt-stricken Chongqing Iron and Steel Company warned of the risk of bankruptcy on Tuesday, after one of its creditors submitted an application to a local court to reorganise its assets, Reuters reported. Chongqing Steel said in a notice posted to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that the creditor, identified as Chongqing Laiquyuan Trading, told a court on Monday that the southwest China-based steelmaker's assets were not sufficient to pay off all its debts.

Kazakhstan’s Halyk Bank may have to inject at least 230 billion tenge ($738 million) into Kazkommertsbank, the troubled lender it’s set to buy for less than $1 after a state bailout, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The cash, coming after the government stumps up 2.4 trillion tenge to shift off Kazkommertsbank’s balance sheet its loans to BTA Bank, would enable the lender to keep operating, the people said, asking not to be identified given the sensitivity of the matter.

Rising defaults in China are unearthing hidden debt at companies across the country, Bloomberg News reported. Small firms that can’t get loans by themselves have been winning banks over by getting other companies to guarantee their borrowings. The companies making those pledges exclude them from their balance sheets, leaving creditors in the dark. Borrowers often extend the guarantees for each other, raising the risk that failures could ricochet, at a time when increasing borrowing costs have already added to strains.

Former Finance Minister Lou Jiwei said China should allow smaller local governments to default on debt because it would signal that central government bailouts aren’t assured, Bloomberg News reported. Such defaults would educate investors that their investments will be allowed to go bad, Lou said Friday at a public finance forum in Beijing. "They need to shoulder responsibility," said Lou, who’s now chairman of the country’s social security fund.

China is engaged in a charm offensive to lure foreign money into its bond market, which has grown in a short period of time from a minnow to the third largest in the world, after the US and Japan, the Financial Times reported. The opening of the bond market to foreigners is part of a transformation in the international financial system, which is slowly linking up with a Chinese economy that was once walled off behind tight capital controls. It is a crucial step in Beijing’s plan to turn the renminbi into one of the anchor currencies of the global economy.

Tata Steel has offered to make a one-off payment of £520m into its UK pension scheme, in its latest effort to make a clean break from its large British retirement liabilities, the Financial Times reported. The Indian steelmaker has put the offer to the trustees of the UK scheme — called British Steel Pension Scheme — as part of moves by Tata to try to hive off the retirement fund. The proposed £520m payment into the BSPS is intended to release a guarantee the scheme holds over some of Tata’s Dutch assets.

Turkey’s government plans to restructure nearly $20 billion in unpaid taxes, the second such move in a year, as it seeks to boost revenue and stimulate growth, Bloomberg News reported. A bill sent to parliament on Tuesday would allow taxpayers to repay existing debt to state institutions over a period of three years starting July, and receive discounts for paying upfront, Finance Minister Naci Agbal said in an interview with Bloomberg HT television in Ankara on Wednesday. The amount covered by the measure is at least 73 billion liras, Agbal said.