CSN’s failure to deliver its financial statements is stymieing talks with creditors, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Latin America’s most indebted steelmaker has yet to file audited financial statements for 2016 and the first quarter of 2017 amid a review of its accounting practices, Bloomberg News reported. Now, state banks Caixa Economica Federal and Banco do Brasil are balking at requests to renegotiate Cia. Siderurgica Nacional SA’s loans, said the people, who asked not to be named because the talks are private.

Reports of a failure to pay a debt to Russia and a requested ruling on whether such a failure constitutes a “credit event” that could trigger insurance contracts on billions of dollars of international bonds have brought Venezuela closer than ever to the brink of financial collapse.

Venezuela has been in talks with Russia about its $1 billion debt restructuring, TASS news agency quoted Venezuela's envoy to Moscow as saying on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Russia has slashed projected revenue by nearly $1 billion to reflect expectations that Venezuela may not make timely payments on bilateral loans, according to a document released by Russia's Audit Chamber on Tuesday. Read more.

Óleo e Gás Participações SA , the oil firm founded by Brazilian tycoon Eike Batista, said on Friday it filed for permission from a court in Rio de Janeiro to exit bankruptcy, Reuters reported. In a securities filing, it said it has fulfilled all its obligations under its court reorganization plan. OGPar, as the company is known, entered bankruptcy status to protect itself from creditors in October 2013. It sought to restructure 13.8 billion reais ($4.25 billion) of debt. In June 2014, creditors approved a debt restructuring program by a 90 percent margin, according to the securities filing.

Venezuela’s opposition is turning up the heat on Wall Street banks by alleging that some of the proceeds from a recent bond sale will be used to purchase weapons and help keep President Nicolas Maduro in power, Bloomberg News reported. In a letter dated June 1, Julio Borges, the president of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, said that at least $300 million in proceeds from the central bank’s “fire sale” of bonds to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Nomura Holdings Inc. will be used to purchase weapons from Russia.

Brasil Distressed, the troubled-asset buyer also known as BrD, shuffled its partnership and said it plans to step up purchases this year, Bloomberg News reported. BrD aims to invest in as much as 1.5 billion reais ($460 million) in soured debt from mid-size Brazilian companies, two-thirds more than it bought last year, Carlos Catraio, a managing partner, said in an interview. The firm has purchased about 3 billion reais in debt since it was created in 2010.

Investors’ hunger for yield can appear callous when people are genuinely starving. One of the more anomalous trades in emerging market debt originates in Venezuela, the South American nation in the midst of a brutal economic meltdown that has resulted in a malnutrition outbreak. Against the odds, the country has been intent on servicing its financial obligations — dubbed “Hunger Bonds” by Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan official, the Financial Times reported.

Creditors of Brazil's Oi SA filed a motion this week in U.S. bankruptcy court to pressure the telephone operator to consider a proposal which could give lenders control of the restructured company, a source close to the lenders said. The creditors believe that a U.S. filing made on Monday in the Southern District of New York will allow them the right to reject the company's reorganization plan in the United States if it is confirmed in Brazil without their input, the source said.

Troubled engineering conglomerate Odebrecht SA’s oil and gas arm said late Tuesday it has entered into an agreement with a group of creditors to restructure its financial debt, The Wall Street Journal reported. Odebrecht Óleo e Gás said it filed the reorganization plan, covering $5 billion in debt, with a Rio de Janeiro court. Creditors representing more than 60% of the claims accepted the plan, the company said in a statement. Odebrecht SA signed a multibillion anticorruption settlement with Brazilian, U.S.

Brazil’s real, stocks and bonds tumbled as a fresh political crisis ensnared President Michel Temer and threatened to derail an agenda designed to pull Latin America’s largest economy out of its deepest recession on record, Bloomberg News reported. Trading on the Ibovespa briefly came to a halt Thursday, sinking the most since 2008, with state-owned companies from Petroleo Brasileiro SA to Banco do Brasil SA among the worst losses. The real posted its biggest slide since 1999 even after the central bank intervened to support the currency.