Tata Steel Ltd. has completed restructuring its British operations with the sale of two steel pipe mills in the U.K. that were put on the block last year, Bloomberg News reported. The Mumbai-based company has entered into a definitive pact with Liberty House Group to sell its 42-inch and 84-inch pipe mills at Hartlepool, employing about 140 people, it said in an exchange filing on Tuesday, without disclosing the financial value. The transaction is expected to be completed in the next few months. “With this sale, Tata Steel U.K.

In January, Innoventive Industries, a speciality steelmaker based in western India, was forced into the bankruptcy court by its lenders, testing for the first time new insolvency rules that aim to resolve India's $150 billion bad debt overhang, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The company, which makes steel tubes and auto parts for customers including Ford, Volkswagen and Tata Motors, posted its third straight annual loss in 2016, prompting ICICI, one of its lead lenders, to trigger bankruptcy proceedings early this year.

India's Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board on Thursday called for public comment on the country's revised bankruptcy code that went into effect last year, signaling that it plans to tweak the law, which the government hopes will resolve India's $150 billion stressed-loans problem, Reuters reported. The board said the window for receiving comments will be open till Dec 31. Modifications to the regulations would be made by March 31 and take effect from April 1, 2018.

Bhushan Steel Ltd reported a March-quarter loss that was much bigger than stated earlier in its unaudited results, as the debt-laden steelmaker was hurt by higher costs, Reuters reported. Audited net loss for the quarter was 11.31 billion rupees ($174.7 million), compared with the unaudited 7.57 billion rupees loss reported in May, Bhushan Steel said late on Wednesday. However, the fourth-quarter loss narrowed marginally from the 11.85 billion rupees loss it reported a year earlier. Total expenses rose more than 18 percent to 59.94 billion rupees for the quarter.

Ten years ago, Essar Steel was leading a rush of Indian corporate investment, exuberantly funded by the country’s dominant state-owned banks, the Financial Times reported. It paid $1.6bn to buy Canada’s Algoma Steel, while pledging billions more to fund projects in Minnesota and Trinidad as well as a doubling of production at its flagship Indian mill to 8.5m tonnes a year.

India's market regulator on Friday set tougher rules for the country's ratings agencies, including mandating them to more closely monitor whether issuers are meeting their debt obligations and increasing disclosure requirements, Reuters reported. Regulators and market participants argue the agencies were slow to adjust ratings of some companies that defaulted. Each of the big three global agencies - Standard & Poor's, Fitch Ratings and Moody's Investors Service - are majority owners of firms in India which operate independently of their parent companies with different rating standards.

Bad debts at Indian lenders, especially state-run banks, have climbed to a 15-year high and may increase further, a central bank study showed, Bloomberg News reported. Under the baseline scenario in a “macro stress test,” the industry’s gross bad-loan ratio may increase to 10.2 percent by March 2018 after climbing to 9.6 percent in March 2017, the highest since 2002, according to the Reserve Bank of India’s Financial Stability Report released Friday. Stressed assets, including soured debt and restructured loans, eased slightly to 12 percent in March 2017 from 12.3 percent in September 2016.

India’s benchmark index rose, snapping a three-session losing streak, on the expiry of monthly derivatives contracts as stocks across Asia advanced on optimism that a pick-up in global growth can withstand tighter financial conditions, Bloomberg News reported. The S&P BSE Sensex climbed 0.1 percent to 30,857.52 at 4:25pm in Mumbai as June derivative contracts expire. Private-sector lender Axis Bank Ltd. rose 4.1 percent after saying about 80 percent of its insolvent loans have been secured. The S&P BSE Metals Index and a gauge of consumer goods stocks were among top gainers.

The delayed $13bn takeover of India’s Essar Oil by a consortium led Rosneft has cleared its last serious obstacles, according to the Russian oil group’s chief executive Igor Sechin. Shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Sochi were told on Thursday by Mr Sechin that a “legal decision was received” that would allow the deal to proceed, the Financial Times reported.

Fifty-six years. That's how long it would take if the one dozen companies the Indian central bank is pushing into bankruptcy were to repay creditors by handing over their entire current operating income, Bloomberg News reported. For India's capital-starved commercial lenders, at the receiving end of much of this $37 billion of unpaid debt, waiting for even 56 days without a resolution isn't an option. Hence the nuclear strike against errant borrowers. The Reserve Bank of India has used authority it received only last month to identify 12 large corporate accounts for action.