China

Chinese conglomerate Anbang Insurance Group, whose former chairman and top shareholder faced trial for fraud last week, will receive a Rmb61bn ($9.7bn) capital injection from an insurance-industry rescue fund, as a transitional arrangement until the company can find new long-term investors, the Financial Times reported. The equity injection by the China Insurance Security Fund (CISF) is "based on the needs of risk disposal work for temporary, partial shareholding" of Anbang, the insurer said in a statement on Wednesday morning.

Wu Xiaohui, the former chairman of China’s giant insurer Anbang, has expressed remorse and sought leniency at the end of his trial for alleged fraud of $10.4 billion (€8.45 billion) in Shanghai, the Irish Times reported. Mr Wu is one of the country’s best-known dealmakers, a politically connected investor whose aggressive drive to buy overseas assets has come to embody the hubris of China’s heavily indebted conglomerates.

Less than a month after it was seized by the Chinese government, Anbang Insurance Group, the giant conglomerate, is once again offering small investors “you snooze, you lose” investment opportunities — your money back, guaranteed. Sold like stocks or bonds in bank branches around China, the products carry names like Anbang Abundant Stability No. 10, suggesting the investments are conservative. They are anything but, the International New York Times reported.

As China’s President Xi Jinping steps up efforts to rein in excessive borrowing, the nation’s corporate bond market faces rising default risks as weaker firms and local borrowers struggle to roll over obligations, Bloomberg News reported. The latest salvo came last month, when the top economic planning body said it will step up scrutiny of the public works-related assets held by companies seeking to sell bonds. The National Development and Reform Commission, or NDRC, also said it would further regulate bond sales by public-private partnership projects.

China is likely to extend an agreement providing crisis-stricken Venezuela with favourable loans repayment terms but will not lend fresh funds to President Nicolas Maduro's government, according to sources in Caracas and Beijing familiar with the situation. During a decade, China plowed more than $50 billion into the OPEC member's coffers through oil-for-loan agreements that helped Beijing secure energy supplies for its fast-growing economy while bolstering an anti-Washington ally in Latin America, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

HNA Group Co., the poster child for runaway corporate debt in China, is increasingly drawing attention to another of the nation’s financial ills: trading halts that leave stock investors trapped for weeks on end. Seven listed units of HNA have halted their shares for seven weeks or more, creating the largest swathe of frozen stock tied to a single business group in China, Bloomberg News reported. The suspensions, which affect $31 billion of equity, have prevented minority shareholders from selling at a time of mounting financial stress for the aviation-to-hotels conglomerate.

China’s overhaul of its financial and business regulators will give the country’s leadership more punch in its top-priority battle to fend off deep-seated risks in the banking system and overall economy, The Wall Street Journal reported.

CEFC China Energy, the once-acquisitive conglomerate, was prepared to pay annual rates of as much as 36 percent for short-term funding in a sign of the cash crunch faced by the company as authorities were closing in on its chairman, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter. Earlier this month it was revealed that Ye Jianming, the company's chairman, had been investigated for suspected economic crimes, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

China, Canada and Hong Kong are among the economies most at risk of a banking crisis, according to early warning indicators compiled by the Bank for International Settlements, Bloomberg News reported. Canada -- whose economy grew last year at the fastest pace since 2011 -- was flagged thanks to its households’ maxed-out credit cards and high debt levels in the wider economy. These same issues also afflict China and Hong Kong, according to the study.

It’s been years coming, but the latest Chinese moves to rein in leverage mean 2018 may be the year for the country’s first bond default by a local government financing vehicle, Bloomberg News reported. The units that amassed record debt in the borrowing-and-building binge after the global financial crisis have faced increasing strains, and with their borrowing costs climbing Moody’s Investors Service and others have anticipated a default at some stage. Aberdeen Standard Investments says the groundwork is now ready for that to happen in 2018.