Indebted Chinese companies increase pressures on govt

Hong Kong

SAINTY Marine Corp started small, buying and selling a few ships in the 1980s. But the state-owned Chinese company went on a debt-fuelled binge during the past few years, opening its own shipyards and signing orders worth hundreds of millions of dollars apiece.

Now, heavily indebted companies such as Sainty Marine are at the centre of the economic troubles in China that have unsettled currency, commodity and stock markets of late.

Sainty Marine just found itself in court, as one of China's biggest banks aske…