Two Chinese groups have renewed their interest in buying a majority stake in National Insurance, Greece’s largest insurer, after a €718m sale agreed with Calamos-Exin, a US-Dutch partnership, collapsed last month, the Financial Times reported. Fosun Investment and Gonbao Investment, the second- and third-ranked bidders, “have returned to the reopened sale process” said one source close to the situation.

Chinese prosecutors indicted the country’s former chief insurance regulator on charges of abusing his power and taking bribes, a year after he was fired amid concerns the industry’s sizzling expansion had saddled the financial system with risk, The Wall Street Journal reported. Xiang Junbo, whose firing last April underscored the severity of a shake-up in China’s financial sector, faces charges that also include using his positions to promote the interests of others, according to a statement from the nation’s top prosecutors office Monday. Specifics of the allegations against Mr.

China will further overhaul its bloated state enterprises and push for mergers in sectors such as power and coal, which are plagued by zombie firms, bankruptcy and debt defaults, according to the head of the agency that oversees state assets valued at $26 trillion, Bloomberg News reported. "Some of the central state-owned enterprises in certain industries are too fragmented and have low efficiency," said Xiao Yaqing, chairman of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, referring to SOEs directly regulated by the central government.

Investors in local-currency Chinese corporate bonds need to be on alert this year, with record maturities and a government crackdown on debt increasing the risk of more defaults, Bloomberg News reported. There were six defaults on bonds in the first quarter, the most since the April-June period of last year, and investors and analysts are predicting more as interest rates rise and China clamps down on excessive borrowing. The tighter financing environment is hitting smaller private-sector firms hardest, as they haven’t benefited from capacity cuts.

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.