The row over insurers’ failure to pay out on business interruption cover dominates the latest set of rulings announced by the Financial Services Ombudsman, the Irish Times reported. The digest of decisions – the sixth published by the ombudsman’s office – gives summaries of 21 decisions issued during 2020 and 2021, of which 12 relate to the investigation of complaints relating to business interruption insurance. “To date, we have received 1,051 complaints arising from the circumstances surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic,” the ombudsman, Ger Deering, said.

The French government accused Britain on Thursday of enforcing discriminatory new rules that will lift quarantine requirements for most vaccinated travelers — but not for those arriving from France, the New York Times reported. The British authorities announced on Wednesday that, starting in August, a quarantine would no longer be required for travelers from the United States or from most of the European Union who had been vaccinated with shots authorized by either American or European drug regulators.

Private equity group American Industrial Partners has moved to take control of one of Sanjeev Gupta’s key assets, the Dunkirk aluminum smelter, in an escalation of an acrimonious battle between the businessman and the suitor he spurned, Bloomberg News reported. A U.K. holding company for the smelter has been placed into administration, according to a filing last week. The legal action was initiated by AIP, according to a person familiar with the matter, who declined to be named as the matter isn’t public. AIP owns most of the senior debt on the Dunkirk plant.

Permanent or long-term debt relief arrangements on mortgages “have substantially higher success rates” than temporary arrangements and are in the best interest of both borrowers and lenders, a new research paper published by the Central Bank has concluded, the Irish Times reported. “This is particularly true during a crisis such as that in Ireland after the 2008 crash, where borrower income shocks were deep and long-lasting, and negative equity was widespread,” the paper’s authors Claire Labonne, Fergal McCann and Terry O’Malley have written.

Germany’s top court on Wednesday dismissed an appeal by two British bankers over their conviction in a massive tax evasion case, confirming that the so-called cum-ex transactions they used were illegal, the Associated Press reported. The Federal Court of Justice also confirmed that the seizure of 14 million euros ($16.5 million) from one of the defendants and about 176 million euros ($207 million) from Hamburg-based private bank M.M. Warburg was justified. The ruling sets a key precedent for future trials in the “cum-ex” scandal involving hundreds of suspects.

Fully vaccinated travelers from the United States and much of Europe will be able to enter Britain without quarantining starting next week, U.K. officials said Wednesday — a move welcomed by Britain’s ailing travel industry, the Associated Press reported. The British government said people who have received both doses of a vaccine approved by the FDA in the U.S. or by the European Medicines Agency, which regulates drugs for the European Union and several other countries, will be able to take pre- and post-arrival coronavirus tests instead of self-isolating for 10 days after entering England.

Federal Law No. 241-FZ of July 1, 2021 has introduced a number of changes to criminal prosecution under Articles 195 ("Unlawful Actions in Bankruptcy") and 196 ("Deliberate Bankruptcy") of Russia's Criminal Code, according to a Dentons' analysis on Mondaq.com. Only one or two dozen people a year are currently prosecuted under these articles. On the one hand, the changes are intended to harshen punishment and expand practice in application of these articles. To this aim, a number of qualifying elements with harsher types and amounts of punishment have been devised.

It may be a further 18 months before long-planned new rules are in place to make it easier for regulators to hold senior managers in banks and other financial firms accountable for failings under their watch, Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe said, the Irish Times reported. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday after securing Cabinet approval to publish the heads of the Central Bank (Individual Accountability) Bill, Mr Donohoe said that it will take up to six months for the planned laws to go through pre-legislative scrutiny with the Oireachtas Finance Committee.

British retailers reported only a slight slowdown in July after sales growth hit its highest in almost three years in June, the first full month after non-essential shops reopened from a coronavirus shutdown, industry data showed on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The Confederation of British Industry's measure of the volume of sales compared with a year earlier dipped to +23 from June's +25, which was the highest since August 2018. The CBI said that the growth in orders was the fastest since December 2010 and the pace of sales was expected to pick up again in August.