India is neglecting bank recapitalisation as it focuses on debt moratoriums and interest waivers for borrowers amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a former central bank official told Reuters on Monday, Reuters reported. Indian banks are saddled with over $120 billion in bad debt, and in severely stressed conditions the bad-loan ratio could nearly double by March, according to Reserve Bank of India projections. Restoring banks’ capital is critical for aiding a meaningful recovery, but there has been little focus on the matter, former RBI Deputy Governor Viral Acharya said.

The court-appointed manager for Ocean Tankers Pte Ltd has applied to the Singapore court to return most of the ships the company manages to the shipowners, as cash is running low and Ocean Tankers will not be able to maintain the fleet, two sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters, Reuters reported. If successful, the move will allow Ocean Tankers, the chartering arm of embattled oil trader Hin Leong Pte Ltd, to resume its cash-generating business such as its oil lubricants business, for which a sales process is underway, the sources said.

India’s Jet Airways would be acquired by an investor consortium under a multi-million dollar resolution plan approved by the carrier’s creditors on Saturday, Reuters reported. The plan submitted by a consortium of London-based Kalrock Capital and UAE-based businessman Murari Lal Jalan comes after months of talks over the airline’s future and was confirmed in a regulatory filing, which gave no details of the deal. A source close to the situation said the new owners had agreed to pump in 10 billion rupees ($136 million) as working capital for the revival of the airline.

Some of the world’s top economies could see their credit ratings cut or put on downgrade warnings in the coming months in a second global wave of coronavirus-related revisions, S&P Global’s top sovereign analyst has warned, Reuters reported. S&P’s sovereign group managing director Roberto Sifon-Arevalo told Reuters that the immense costs of supporting health systems, firms and workers through the pandemic was fundamentally altering some countries’ finances for the worse.

Singapore’s efforts to promote itself as a global restructuring hub have been hit by a court’s decision to grant a distressed water company an unprecedented string of extensions as it battles to avoid liquidation, the Financial Times reported. A court in the city-state said on Friday that the next hearing in the case of Hyflux would take place on November 16 following a decision on Wednesday to grant the water management group a 12th adjournment. The Singaporean company has become saddled with S$2.7bn ($2bn) in unsecured debt after years of soaring growth came to a halt.

Long-haul, low-cost carrier AirAsia X Bhd has run out of money and needs to raise up to 500 million ringgit ($120.60 million) to restart the airline, deputy chairman Lim Kian Onn said in a newspaper interview published on Saturday, Reuters reported. The Malaysian airline, the long-haul arm of AirAsia Group Bhd, said this month it wanted to restructure 63.5 billion ringgit ($15.32 billion) of debt and slash its share capital by 90% to continue as a going concern. “We have run out of money,” Lim told The Star newspaper.

Thailand’s central bank will not extend a broad-based debt moratorium but will introduce targeted measures to help debtors affected by the coronavirus pandemic, an assistant governor said on Friday, Reuters reported. Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy posted its deepest contraction in over two decades in the second quarter and the pandemic has battered tourism and domestic activity. The central bank will monitor the situation closely and did not expect rapid and large defaults after the six-month debt holiday ended on Thursday, Assistant Governor Roong Mallikamas told a briefing.

The head of the International Monetary Fund on Sunday called for significant steps to address the increasingly unsustainable debt burdens of some countries, urging creditors and debtors to start restructuring processes sooner rather than later, Reuters reported. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said a six-month extension of the Group of 20 major economies’ freeze in official bilateral payments would help low-income countries hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic, but more urgent action was needed.

A Turkish energy producer and distributor started preliminary talks with lenders to renegotiate interest rates on $3.9 billion of debt to try and benefit from lower borrowing costs, Bloomberg News reported. Bereket Enerji approached nine lenders about adjusting rates on debt that had previously been restructured, people with knowledge of the matter said. Some banks are reluctant to meet the demand, while others are more sympathetic, the people said, asking not to be identified as the deliberations are confidential. Negotiations are continuing, they said.

AirAsia X Bhd (AAX), now at an existential crossroads, is in dire need of massive debt forgiveness from its creditors, or be prepared to shut its business down for good, AviationPros.com reported. The low-cost, medium-haul airline, which has grounded all its flights due to the Covid-19 outbreak, is asking creditors and suppliers to forgo over RM63bil in liability and instead accept a maximum RM200mil in payment. While the proposal may sound atrocious, analysts think many creditors would, in fact, accept the offer.