Creditor J&T Private Investments (JTPI) said on Thursday it had taken over shareholder rights and installed crisis management at CEFC Europe, the Czech-based part of troubled Chinese conglomerate CEFC China Energy, Reuters reported. The move is a sign of fresh woes for CEFC Europe which bought Czech assets from real estate to breweries, an engineering firm, an airline and a football club, under an investment drive promoted by Czech President Milos Zeman. CEFC Europe protested against the move, saying it had the money ready to cover the debt.

Not long ago China was a leading culprit in global economic imbalances. Whether blame was ascribed to its undervalued yuan or its frugal people, the problem seemed clear. China was selling a lot abroad and buying too little back, The Economist reported. One data-point summed this up: its currentaccount surplus reached 10% of GDP in 2007, well above the level that is generally seen as reasonable. Far less attention has been paid to its steady decline since then.

China's stock exchanges have stepped up their scrutiny of the booming asset-backed securities (ABS) market, publishing new rules that require prompt information disclosure and risk management updates from issuers, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. China's ABS market has exploded over the past few years as the government's crackdown on shadow banking pushed borrowers to alternative sources of finance. Issuance of ABS jumped to 1.5 trillion yuan ($236.84 billion) last year, from almost zero in 2013, according to consultancy China Securities Analytics.

With corporate-debt defaults on the rise, China’s securities regulator will probe bond funds to ensure that they have proper risk controls in place, according to people familiar with the matter. The China Securities Regulatory Commission’s investigation will include whether individual firms’ funds are shuffling high-risk bonds between them, said the people who asked not to be named as the discussions aren’t public, Bloomberg News reported. One suspicion is mutual-fund companies may be motivated to beautify their holdings to avoid a mass withdrawal by investors, the people said.

A Shanghai court imprisoned a tycoon who used a mountain of debt to buy the Waldorf Astoria hotel. Small Chinese companies are increasingly saying they cannot repay their bills, as money gets more expensive or harder to find, the International New York Times reported. For other private businesses, the cost to borrow has shot up. Faced with the looming consequences of a decade-long borrowing binge, the Chinese government is intensifying its efforts stamp out risky lending and speculative froth from the world’s second-largest economy.

China credit spreads hit their widest level in nearly two years this week following new regulations that undermined long-held assumptions about implicit guarantees on debt linked to local governments, the Financial Times reported. Chinese localities have long used arm’s length local government financing vehicles (LGFVs) to skirt restrictions on direct fiscal borrowing and to finance infrastructure, contributing to a surge in economy-wide debt since 2008.

In the event of a shock to China’s economy, problems are likely to emanate from a set of small banks with poor financials and a loan book exposure to China’s weakest provincial economies, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. In the wake of the global financial crisis, China saw an explosion not only in the level of debt in the economy, but also in the development of complex and opaque shadow banking structures.

China is setting up a special court in Shanghai to deal with the complex financial cases that are rising apace with the deepening of the country’s financial system, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Shanghai Financial Court is expected to start operations by the end of August after Chinese lawmakers on Friday gave their approval. The court will merge special financial tribunals in the current Shanghai court system that have handled a spiraling number of finance-related civil cases—179,000 last year, after rising an average of 51% each year since 2013—officials said.

A Chinese property developer whose owner bought a stake in SeaWorld Entertainment Inc. is piling up overdue loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars, as a government campaign to control debt starts to squeeze China’s property sector, The Wall Street Journal reported. Zhonghong Holding Co. disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday that it defaulted on more than 1.1 billion yuan in borrowings, doubling in the past five weeks a pile of overdue debt that totaled 2.27 billion yuan ($360 million).

HNA Group Co.’s bonds are rebounding as the Chinese conglomerate steps up asset sales. But its debt remains large despite efforts to pay it down, prompting some observers to recommend selling the notes. HNA and its subsidiaries face record bond repayments in the second half. That puts even more of a focus on the group’s total debt, which rose to at least 637.5 billion yuan ($101 billion) by November, as it releases results as soon as this week, Bloomberg News reported.