The Financial Reporting Council fined PricewaterhouseCoopers on Tuesday after the U.K. audit and accounting regulator found issues with the firm’s audits of two construction groups, the Wall Street Journal reported. The FRC said it imposed sanctions of roughly £5 million—equivalent to about $6.3 million—for failings in PwC’s audits of Galliford Try Holdings PLC and Kier Group PLC, which have market caps of around £191 million and £345 million, respectively. PwC in a statement expressed regret that certain audits weren’t up to standards and said it has worked to improve audit quality.

Relocating euro clearing from London to the European Union must be "market-led" rather than mandatory, with the shift already well underway, the head of Eurex Clearing said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. After Brexit, the European Union has said it will not allow EU market participants to clear euro derivatives in London after June 2025, citing a need to end its heavy reliance on that market in the same way the bloc is cutting dependency on Russian energy.

Britain will begin live testing of crypto blockchain technology for traditional market activities such as trading and settlement of stocks and bonds next year as part of a drive to become a global "crypto hub", the finance ministry said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Gwyneth Nurse, the ministry's director general for financial services, said the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT), which underpins cryptoassets, is a key priority for making financial market infrastructure more innovative and efficient for users.

Bondholders are in for a tangled mess of financial, political and legal wrangling if sanctions push Russia to a historic default, Bloomberg News reported. So far, Moscow has been able to navigate the restrictions to service its international debt, but that’s likely to change after the US closed another avenue to creditors, affecting about $100 million in payments due on May 27. The European Union has also sanctioned Russia’s central depository, which said it would suspend euro-denominated transactions.

Hungary plans to offer bonds in euros and dollars as Prime Minister Viktor Orban seeks alternatives to billions of euros in blocked European Union funding, Bloomberg News reported. Hungary is seeking to sell seven-year and 12-year benchmark-sized bonds in dollars and nine-year bonds in euros in the near future, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak about it. BNP Paribas SA, Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., ING Groep NV and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are to arrange the sale, the person said.

Insolvency and restructuring specialists in the U.K. are preparing for a flurry of activity as supply chain issues, spiraling energy costs and rising inflation trigger a wave of corporate distress and bankruptcies, the Telegram reported. The signs are already ominous. During the first three months of the year, around 137,000 businesses closed their doors for good in the UK, a jump of nearly a quarter on the same period in 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

An already tough year for sterling corporate credit may get worse as Prime Minister Boris Johnson faces a crunch no-confidence vote, Bloomberg News reported. Borrowing costs for UK companies are at the highest since 2014, while an index of sterling corporate credit is on its longest losing run ever, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. With surging inflation and an uncertain economic outlook on the horizon, what markets don’t need right now is more uncertainty.

EU Economic Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni said on Saturday he aimed to present a reform of the eurozone Stability Pact after the summer, adding that the new rules would likely include country-specific debt targets, Reuters reported. The European Union pact stipulates an upper limit of 60% for the ratio between the public debt and GDP (gross domestic product) of each member state, but a debate is underway in Europe on how to make the rules more flexible.

The Bucharest Chemical Equipment Assembly Trust (TMUCB), a company with a history of over 60 years and one of the largest companies in the construction field, announced that it managed to recover after an eight-year insolvency period, Romania-Insider.com reported. Since 1958, TMUCB has carried out complex turnkey technological projects for the chemical and petrochemical, metallurgical, cement, pulp and paper mills, thermal and nuclear power plants, sugar factories, car factories, tanks, transmission and distribution pipelines for petrochemicals, gas, water, steam, in Romania and abroad.

Ukraine's central bank on Friday said in a statement that it had recognised Kharkiv's Megabank as insolvent, citing lending practices at the bank ahead of the war, Reuters reported. The bank, which reported shareholder capital of 823.7 mln hryvnias ($28.16 million) last June, is 11.3% owned by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and 11.3% by Germany's KfW. https://www.businessfast.co.uk/ukraine-central-bank-declares-kharkivs-mega-bank-insolvent/Ukraine Central Bank Declares Kharkiv's Mega Bank Insolvent