Sahaviriya Steel Industries has reached an agreement with its creditors to enter debt-restructuring for the massive Bt50 billion it owes them and has pulled the plug on its upstream plant in Britain as part of its strategy to keep its core business in Thailand afloat, The Nation reported. "The huge loss of the UK base is crimping the cash flows of SSI in Thailand, so we had to keep the hot-rolled coil steel business in Thailand going by opening negotiations with lenders," Win Viriyaprapaikit, president of SSI, said yesterday.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has suspended the credit licence of PAID International Ltd until April next year because it is insolvent and stopped providing loans, ABC News reported. An external administrator was appointed in January this year and the company kept trading. Last year, the administrator agreed to repay nearly $1 million to 6,650 customers who paid excessive fees on more than 20,000 loans. The company, which used to be called First Stop Money, has so far refunded nearly $240,000 of that money to consumers under an agreement with ASIC.

Baoding Tianwei Group Co. and three of its business units are filing for bankruptcy, five months after the maker of electrical transformers became the first state-owned Chinese company to default on an onshore bond, Bloomberg News reported. Tianwei and its units are insolvent and cannot pay their debts, the company said in a statement posted on Chinamoney.com.cn, a website of the China Foreign Exchange Trade System. Tianwei said it plans to meet its backers to discuss the bankruptcy.

South Korea plans to open a government-led corporate restructuring market to speed up the liquidation of "zombie" companies and resuscitate marginal firms suffering a "temporary" financial stress, Xinhua reported. "Corporate restructuring led only by creditor banks faced limitations. It needs to encourage various market players to join it, and market-centered restructuring is preferred," Lee Myung Soon, director general of Financial Services Commission's financial and corporate restructuring policy bureau, told foreign correspondents in Seoul Friday.

Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic Games will be the first of a leaner type of competition that will limit spending on big-ticket venues to avoid alienating the public, Chief Executive Officer Toshiro Muto said, two months after debt-ridden Japan canceled plans for a futuristic main stadium, Bloomberg News reported. The International Olympic Committee last year set out a new agenda that favors existing venues over purpose-built stadiums, as concerns mount in potential host countries over the burden of holding the event.

With its market dominance, banking talent, global ambition and sterling political connections, Citic Securities fancied itself the Goldman Sachs of China, the International New York Times reported. Citic Securities, the brokerage arm of the biggest state-owned financial conglomerate, rode China’s stock market boom and a surge in corporate borrowing. The company’s stock price tripled in six months.

Standard & Poor’s on Wednesday lowered Japan’s sovereign debt rating one notch, in the latest sign of concern about Japan’s economic prospects nearly three years after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took power, The Wall Street Journal reported. S&P said it was lowering the rating to A-plus from AA-minus because weak economic growth makes it less likely that the government can quickly improve the nation’s fiscal health.

Asia’s “trade recession” appears to have worsened in August — with India, China, South Korea and Indonesia all posting sharp declines — as a vicious circle of weakening currencies and faltering demand hits exports across the region, analysts said. Asia, led by China, has long been the world’s most dynamic trading region. But exports this year have posted their worst performance since the 2008-09 financial crisis, falling 7.7 per cent in July to register a ninth consecutive month of year on year falls in US dollar terms, according to data compiled by Capital Economics, a research company.

The view that China is growing far slower than official figures show is increasingly going mainstream, with big global investors among those now basing decisions on a rate of about 5 per cent, the Financial Times reported. According to government statistics China’s economy grew at an annual pace of 7 per cent in the second quarter of this year, in line with Beijing’s target for the year and the World Bank estimate of 7.1 per cent.

China National Erzhong Group Co. may miss an interest payment later this month after one of its creditors filed a restructuring request, putting it at risk of becoming the second state-owned company to default in the nation’s onshore bond market, Bloomberg News reported today. The smelting-equipment maker might not be able to pay a coupon that’s due Sept. 28 on its 1 billion yuan ($157 million) of 5.65 percent 2017 notes if a local court accepts the creditor’s restructuring application before that date, according to a statement posted on Chinamoney.com.cn.