Banks and investors involved in the court reorganization of energy group Abengoa Bioenergia Brasil SA hope to get paid through a potential sale of the company’s two sugarcane mills, two sources close to the matter told Reuters. There are non-disclosure agreements signed with four potential bidders for the mills, said one of the sources, Reuters reported. Two of the suitors already operate in the sector while the other two are investment funds, the source said.

Seara Indústria e Comércio de Produtos Agropecuários, a Brazilian mid-sized grain trader that sought bankruptcy protection last year, on Monday filed its recovery plan in a local court, the company said on Tuesday. Seara Agro, based in the Paraná state and with no relations to a more well known poultry and pork processor also called Seara controlled by JBS SA, caused a management reshuffle at U.S. cooperative CHS Inc last year after defaulting on a $218 million debt with it, Reuters reported. The grain trader also has Bunge Ltd, Dutch bank Rabobank Groep and Credit Suisse among its creditors.

Venezuelan debt is kicking off 2018 on a tear. The nation’s bonds, which led global losses in 2017 after the government declared it needed to restructure its debt, have returned a world-leading 12 percent, Bloomberg News reported. That’s four times what investors got from second-place Tajikistan, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Standard & Poor’s downgraded Brazil’s credit rating deeper into junk territory on Thursday, citing the government’s failure to pass key fiscal reforms, the Financial Times reported. The move by the rating agency is a slap in the face for the administration of President Michel Temer, which has been touting Brazil’s progress in recovering from its worst recession on record. The stock market has also been hitting new records.

Bonds investors are finally acting like they’ve lost hope that Venezuela will make any future debt payments, The Wall Street Journal reported. Traders debated for weeks about whether to continue pricing the oil-rich country’s sovereign debt with the assumption that it would keep making interest payments. But as the pile of unpaid coupons racked up, the association for emerging market debt traders this week threw in the towel and announced that from now on, the market should assume Venezuela isn’t likely to pay.

Fund managers holding Venezuela government bonds face a day of reckoning after months of waiting for more than half a billion dollars in late interest payments, Bloomberg News reported. Since November, investors following guidelines established by the Emerging Markets Traders Association have marked their Venezuela bond holdings to include all the interest they were owed, even though it hadn’t shown up yet. The trade group decided to scratch that rule Monday, and say that beginning today the nation’s debt will trade flat, or without accrued interest.

Ecuador's comptroller's office on Monday announced it will open an audit of debt contracted in the last five years of the government of former President Rafael Correa to determine the legality of the operations and the use of the funds. The move follows a report by the comptroller's office revealing that some documentation relating to debt operations had been declared secret and that official reports on public debt had excluded some of the operations, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

The judge overseeing the restructuring process of Brazilian telecom company Oi SA approved a massive debt restructuring plan on Monday and called a proposed shareholders meeting “absolutely unnecessary,” Reuters reported. In the decision, Judge Fernando Viana gave the official go-ahead to Latin America’s largest ever in-court debt reorganization. On Dec. 20, a majority of Oi creditors approved a plan to restructure 65 billion reais ($20.1 billion) of debt, putting an end to a year and a half of negotiations.

Venezuela’s bonds have lost about three-quarters of their value, reflecting a dozen missed payments by the government and the state-owned oil company. But many of their bondholders are still feeling flush, The Wall Street Journal reported. A number of investors have made their money back and more, thanks to coupon payments topping 13% and large principal payments that typically begin three years before a bond matures. A recent example includes bonds from state-oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PdVSA, which matured in November.

Venezuela has defaulted on another debt obligation, according to S&P Global Ratings, intensifying investor fears about the country’s ability to make more than $9 billion in bond payments due in 2018,The Wall Street Journal reported. The ratings firm said Tuesday that Venezuela failed to make $35 million in coupon payments for its bonds due in 2018 within a 30-day grace period. The government and the state-owned oil company are now behind on $1.28 billion in payments, according to investment firm Caracas Capital. S&P classifies these missed payments as defaults.