Corporate treasury departments in India have become so concerned about credit risk they’re increasingly parking their cash in securities maturing overnight. Assets with overnight funds soared to 123 billion rupees ($1.8 billion) last month, from 39 billion rupees in September, as companies chose safety over returns in the wake of a rare debt default, data from Morningstar Investment Adviser India Pvt. show, Bloomberg News reported.

India’s massive pile of bad business debt has kept asset-reconstruction companies busy in recent years. But as signs emerge that the supply of such assets may be leveling off, the nation’s largest buyer of bad loans is considering a rare move to start purchasing soured consumer debt, Bloomberg News reported. Edelweiss Asset Reconstruction Co. is setting up a team for that and seeks to start purchases in 2019, Chief Executive Officer Raj Kumar Bansal said in an interview. “Corporate non-performing assets have plateaued,” Bansal said.

India’s economy grew at a much slower pace than economists expected last quarter, giving the central bank more reason to keep interest rates unchanged this week, Bloomberg News reported. After breaking through the 8 percent mark in the quarter through June, growth eased to 7.1 percent in the three months through September -- lower than almost all the estimates in a Bloomberg survey -- as back-to-back rate hikes in June and August, a funding squeeze and subdued growth in farming put a brake on the world’s fastest-expanding economy.

India’s foreign ministry is investigating claims by expatriates in Ethiopia who say they are being held hostage by local staff that haven’t been paid after the shadow lender Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Ltd. began defaulting on $12.6 billion in debt, Bloomberg News reported. Seven Indian workers from infrastructure financing firm IL&FS, which rocked financial markets after it began missing debt payments in late August, have been detained since Nov.

The Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has admitted and initiated insolvency proceedings against Mumbai-based Ariisto Developers and has appointed an interim resolution professional (IRP) to manage the company, The Economic Times reported. NCLT has asked other lenders to file their claims against Ariisto Developers by the first week of December.

A banking liquidity crunch and weak business sentiment before state elections this year outweighed signs of a revival in consumer demand during India’s main festival season, keeping the outlook for the world’s fastest-growing major economy muted, Bloomberg News reported. An overall activity indicator measuring animal spirits -- a term coined by British economist John Maynard Keynes to refer to investors’ confidence in taking action -- was unchanged in October despite a slew of data from two-wheeler vehicle sales to consumer demand showing an improvement from the previous month.

The government is exploring the feasibility of implementing a so-called “pre-packaged” bankruptcy scheme, prevalent in countries like the US, in India to aid the existing insolvency framework and cut costs and time of the resolution process, The Financial Express reported. The planned scheme, if implemented, will be a “pre-IBC (Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code) window for the resolution of stressed assets, which will complement the existing framework and not substitute it,” corporate affairs secretary Injeti Srinivas told FE on Monday.

Steelmakers taking control of insolvent plants will result in greater capacity utilisation, triggering a “steep” hike in domestic demand of graphite electrodes, according to Ravi Jhunjhunwala, chairman and managing director of HEG Ltd,  BloombergQuint reported. “A lot of steel plants have changed hands recently and a lot are likely to change hands in the near future,” Jhunjhunwala told BloombergQuint.

A consortium of banks has applied to the debt recovery tribunal in Delhi seeking to enforce personal guarantees on the promoters of Videocon group, Venugopal Dhoot and his brother Rajkumar Dhoot. Videocon owes these banks Rs 20,000 crore, The Economic Times reported. An application by the State Bank of India that ET has reviewed said it was approaching the tribunal as the Dhoots did not respond to a guarantee invocation notice sent to them. The Dhoots had promised to personally repay the banks if their companies defaulted on the loans, according to the application.

India’s debt-laden Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) said on Monday it received more than a dozen expressions of interest for its stakes in subsidiaries IL&FS Securities Services, and ISSL Settlement & Transaction Services, Reuters reported. IL&FS, a major infrastructure financing and development company, earlier this month started work on plans to sell off assets, part of a wider restructuring of the group after it defaulted on some of its debt.