The U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office must pay Eurasian Natural Resources Corp. after it began a corruption investigation based on tips improperly obtained from a senior lawyer for the company, a U.K. court said. The SFO committed a “serious breach” of its own duties by privately communicating with a lawyer then at Dechert, a law firm hired by the company to run an internal investigation into possible bribery, Justice David Waksman of the High Court in London said Thursday in a written judgment. Without those communications, the agency wouldn’t have launched its investigation, Waksman found.

A Czech court declared an overall moratorium on the debts of Liberty Ostrava on Thursday, a court document showed, as the country's main steelmaker idled production and prepared a recovery plan after its energy supplier cut it off, Reuters reported. Liberty's on-site supplier of energy including heat, pressurised air and electricity, Tameh, was expected to finish cutting off deliveries on Thursday after falling into insolvency itself when the steelmaker missed payments. Most of Liberty's 6,000 employees are to be sent home until January, the company has said.

Digital freight forwarding platform, Instafreight, has filed for insolvency in mid-December at the Berlin-Charlottenburg district court, BNNBreaking.com reported. The startup, founded in 2016 by Philipp Ortwein and Gion-Otto Presser-Velder, had successfully raised over 70 million euros in capital over its operational years. Still, the company ran into a financial cul-de-sac due to over-indebtedness, an ironic situation considering it did not face any liquidity issues.

A trade association is urging business owners to seek help sooner rather than later if they are facing financial problems, the Bournemouth Daily Echo reported. R3, the trade body for restructuring and insolvency professionals in Dorset, has said that corporate insolvencies have ‘shot up’ by more than a fifth compared to last year. Newly published figures for England and Wales show a rise from 2,032 insolvencies in November 2022 to 2,466 for November of this year.

Britain and Switzerland signed a wide-ranging financial services deal on Thursday granting reciprocal market access for their banks, insurers, asset managers and stock exchanges to boost trade and cut compliance costs, Reuters reported. After two years of talks which began after Britain left the European Union, the deal - which will require British and Swiss parliamentary approval - is based on mutual recognition of rules and supervisors, easing regulatory burdens.

Prosecutors in Germany said on Wednesday they would move to confiscate more than 720 million euros ($790 million) from the Frankfurt bank account of a Russian financial institution, marking the country's first such attempt, Reuters reported. German authorities have previously moved to freeze Russian assets in response to Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but have stopped short of attempts to confiscate money.

English councils will receive a 6.5% funding boost next year to help them battle soaring costs, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government said, but the move failed to quell growing fears of a looming wave of bankruptcies, Bloomberg News reported. Michael Gove, the UK’s secretary of state for leveling up, housing and communities, on Monday announced almost £4 billion ($5.1 billion) of extra cash for local councils in 2024/25, taking their total central government funding to over £64 billion. While the government said this represented a rise in real terms, the sector criticized the uplift.

A streak of unexpectedly good news on inflation has continued in Britain, as the annual rate of price increases dropped to its lowest level in more than two years, the New York Times reported. Consumer prices in Britain rose 3.9 percent in November from a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday. That was down from 4.6 percent the previous month and the lowest since September 2021. Price growth slowed as fuel costs declined and food inflation continued to ease.

An artificial intelligence system can't be registered as the inventor of a patent, Britain's Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in a decision that denies machines the same status as humans, the Associated Press reported. The U.K.'s highest court concluded that “an inventor must be a person” to apply for patents under the current law. The decision was the culmination of American technologist Stephen Thaler's long-running British legal battle to get his AI, dubbed DABUS, listed as the inventor of two patents.

Insolvent European property company Signa is holding talks to potentially sell its stake in New York's Chrysler Building and is shedding its private jet, its administrator said on Tuesday, a significant development in the salvaging of founder Rene Benko's real estate empire, Reuters reported. The efforts, announced to Signa's creditors in Vienna, mark a first update by the court-appointed insolvency administrator on plans for Signa, the biggest casualty so far of Europe's property crisis.