Asia

Qinghai Provincial Investment Group Co. has again missed a coupon payment on a dollar bond, a sign that a local government-led debt restructuring has yet to ease finances at the Chinese state-backed aluminum producer, Bloomberg News reported. The company has yet to wire funds to pay a coupon that came due Thursday on a $300 million 2020 note, according to a person familiar with the matter. It is in talks with financial institutions for funds to make a delayed payment, said the person who is not authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified.

Bangladeshi banks are facing another jump in already-crippling levels of bad debt as a move by the central bank to ease the situation backfires, Bloomberg News reported. In an effort to revive credit growth, Bangladesh Bank in May introduced an amnesty program that allowed delinquent borrowers to clean up their books by making a small upfront payment and then clearing the rest of their debt over 10 years at favorable interest rates. But it also triggered a rush by healthy companies to reschedule debt on the same terms, which now threatens to overwhelm the banks.

The government of the Chinese city of Tianjin, the only shareholder of bankrupt Bohai Steel Group Ltd, is demanding that Bohai’s creditors and strategic investor implement a bankruptcy restructuring plan by the end of September, two creditor sources with direct knowledge of the matter said, Reuters reported. Bohai Steel, a former Fortune Global 500 company that was founded by the Tianjin municipal government in 2010 by merging four local steelmakers, collapsed in 2016 with more than 200 billion yuan ($28.4 billion) in unpaid debt, the biggest bankruptcy restructuring in China’s history.

Housing Development & Infrastructure Ltd. fell to a record and Oberoi Realty Ltd. dropped as authorities intensify their clean up of India’s struggling property sector, Bloomberg News reported. Bankruptcy proceedings will begin against HDIL after creditor Bank of India filed an application, the developer said in a filing Tuesday, adding that it will appeal the decision.

Indian tycoons including Ajay Piramal and Pallonji Mistry are grappling with a prolonged realty slump that’s adding to the shadow banking crisis, showing that even the nation’s richest can’t escape widening cracks in the debt market, Bloomberg News reported. Ratings of some companies in the conglomerates run by billionaires Piramal and Mistry have been cut as the business environment worsened and funding costs rose.

HNA Group Co. repaid a dollar-denominated bond on Monday amid a report China’s provincial government offered to help the debt-laden conglomerate meet payments to its offshore creditors, Bloomberg News reported. HNA Group International, a unit of HNA Group, repaid a $300 million bond due Aug. 18, a company spokesperson told Bloomberg, saying “we remain committed to meeting our financial obligations.” REDD reported last week that the Hainan government would provide 1 billion yuan ($142 million) to HNA Group to help it repay that bond.

Offshore support vessel (OSV) operator Icon Offshore Bhd is making a cash call to raise up to RM250 million fresh capital and to restructure RM370.66 million of debt, partly by issue of new shares, The Edge reported. Its single largest shareholder Ekuinas Nasional Bhd, which holds its 42.3% stake through Hallmark Odyssey Sdn Bhd, is committed to subscribe up to RM183 million of the proposed rights issue that is sweetened by free warrants, Icon Offshore said in a statement. The commitment of RM183 million is equivalent to 73.2% of RM250 million intended to be raised.

Videocon Industries said on Monday it is unable to publish its financial results for the quarter ended June 30 due to the ongoing consolidation of insolvency proceedings of it along with other 12 group firms, The Economic Times reported. In a regulatory filing, the company said filing of the quarterly results have been delayed due to the complexity involved in the consolidation of corporate insolvency resolution process (CIRP) the 13 group companies as directed by the Mumbai bench of National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT).

India’s jobs scene -- with unemployment at a 45-year high -- is looking gloomy with hiring activity slowing across most sectors, Bloomberg News reported. Banks, insurers, auto makers and logistics and infrastructure companies are among those hiring at a slower pace, according to the study by Care Ratings Ltd. that relied on annual reports for the year ended March from nearly 1,000 companies. The services sector, which accounts for a bulk of the economy, was the lone sweet spot that displayed robust jobs growth, the study by the credit assessor showed.

The chronically lossmaking Scunthorpe steelworks, which three years ago renamed itself British Steel, is to get a new, Turkish, owner, The Times reported. The UK government, which marshalled British Steel into insolvency earlier this summer, the latest failure of the hapless Meyohas brothers who run Greybull Capital, has named Ataer Holding as the preferred bidder for the sprawling Scunthorpe plant. Ataer is an arm of Oyak, Turkey’s military pension fund, and also owns nearly about 49 per cent of Turkey’s biggest steel group, Erdemir.