India

India's Suzlon Energy Ltd hopes to exit a process of corporate debt restructuring by March 2017, its chairman said on Thursday, a turnaround for a company that four years ago reeled under heavy debt after an ill-advised overseas expansion, the Economic Times reported. Suzlon's purchase of German wind energy firm RePower, now renamed Senvion, for 1.4 billion euros ($1.56 billion) in 2007 proved a costly mistake after the 2008 global financial crisis dented demand for wind turbines.

After more than a year of gridlock, the upper house of India’s parliament approved a contentious overhaul of the country’s convoluted tax system, an important step in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign to modernize Asia’s No. 3 economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. Lawmakers voted Wednesday to replace India’s jumble of federal, state and interstate sales taxes with a nationwide goods-and-services tax, or GST. Parliament’s lower house, where Mr.

The head of a credit fund controlled by Indian billionaire Uday Kotak said the government’s push to rid banks of bad loans will outlast the departure of a central bank governor who battled the problem, Bloomberg News reported today. Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan, who set a deadline for Indian lenders to clean up their soured debt by March 2017, leaves office in early September. The banking industry’s gross bad-loan ratio jumped to a 13-year high of 7.6 percent at the end of March, underscoring a key challenge for the next central bank head.

Asset manager Brookfield has put $1 billion into a joint venture with India’s biggest bank to recapitalise and provide financial support to distressed corporate clients, the Financial Times reported today. The State Bank of India (SBI) announced that Brookfield, which specializes in infrastructure and private equity, had not only committed 70 billion Rupees ($1 billion) to a fund that will invest in stressed assets but also plans to help manage the recapitalized businesses. The SBI announcement represents a new tack from a state-owned banking sector hamstrung by mounting bad debts.

From deodorant makers to steel mills, Indian banks are getting stuck owning assets they are finding hard to sell under a plan where they exchange soured loans for equity, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. India’s banks have converted or are seeking to convert loans to at least 22 companies, amounting to more than 1 trillion rupees ($14.9 billion), into majority stakes since June 2015, data compiled from exchange filings shows.

India begins its four-week monsoon session of parliament today, with prime minister Narendra Modi’s government hoping to move ahead with long-awaited tax reforms to turn the country into a genuine single market, the Financial Times reported today. The adoption of a goods and services tax, or GST — to replace a raft of different state and local taxes with a single unified value added tax system — is seen as potentially transformative for India’s economy.

Lenders to Essar Steel Ltd have started discussions to restructure the company’s debt after it failed to meet a June-end deadline to find a buyer, said two people aware of the development. The debt-laden company has been looking for a buyer since November. “There has been a lot of discussion and waiting in this case. Now, the consortium has decided that it is best to restructure the debt and move on. As such, Essar Steel is a non-performing account with a large number of banks in the consortium,” said a banker at a state-owned bank involved in the case, speaking on condition of anonymity.

India’s central bank has warned that bad loan ratios will continue to rise this year, raising pressure on the government to expand its planned recapitalisation of the banking sector, the Financial Times reported. India’s state-owned banks, which account for nearly three-quarters of banking assets, have been hit hard by a wave of defaults on loans made in recent years to sectors such as infrastructure and steel.

Rolta India Ltd bondholders are forming a group to negotiate a debt restructuring after the software services provider failed to make interest payments, according to a document seen by Reuters on Friday. Rolta, whose biggest customer is the Indian government, said late on Friday its management was working on "addressing the overall situation in a comprehensive manner", blaming the cash crunch on significant expenses on a defence project and delays in payment collections.

The Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) new restructuring tool unveiled on Monday will raise banks' moral hazard risk because the high debt of these over-leveraged companies means their market capitalisation does not match the haircuts banks are likely to take, the Economic Times reported. Under a new 'Scheme for Sustainable Structuring of Stressed Assets' (S4A), RBI allowed banks to take equity in debt laden firms permitting them to split total loans of struggling companies into sustainable and unsustainable based on the cash flows of the projects.