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.

Brazil's electricity watchdog Aneel expects a further delay in the construction of 6,000 kilometers of power lines licensed to Abengoa SA, raising concern over the reliability of the country's grid as a massive new dam comes online, according to an internal document seen by Reuters. Abengoa halted construction of the transmission lines in 2015 amid a financial crisis at its headquarters in Spain which was followed by a bankruptcy filing at its units operating in Brazil, Reuters reported.

Banks are raising the heat on Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht SA to put its house in order after months of treating the scandal-hit company with kid gloves because of fears its collapse could hurt their balance sheets, sources said.

One year ago, Brazil’s Vice President Michel Temer — a veteran political operative — took the country’s helm after Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, promising to rein in public spending and return the economy to expansion. While he has taken steps to control the government’s outlays, growth remains elusive, Bloomberg News reported. Investors are pretty happy with his tenure, but Brazilians are somewhat less so, with opinion polls showing his approval rating hovering around the 10 percent mark. Still, no one’s complaining about the drop in inflation.

Risk perception for most of the world's countries have improved in the past year, according to a Standard Chartered analysis of credit default swaps (CDS), contrasting with deterioration in France, Italy, the United States and Germany, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. CDS are derivatives used by investors to hedge against a default or restructuring of debt. The higher the risk of default, the higher the CDS spread.