Shortly after the last ever Monarch Airlines flight landed at Manchester Airport in the early hours of Monday morning, the airline entered administration, prompting the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to launch its "biggest ever peacetime repatriation" to bring home the 110,000 Monarch customers stranded abroad.

The impact on those travellers should be minimal, but an estimated 750,000 customers' future flights and holidays have been cancelled. Where they stand primarily comes down to whether their booking is protected by the UK's Air Travel Organisers' Licence (ATOL) scheme.

Legal changes affecting construction businesses from 1 October 2015

1 October 2015 ushers in a number of legal changes which affect construction businesses operating in the UK. We have provided brief highlights of some of the changes below. If you need further information, please contact us using the details on the right.

The Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems within Basel has published a report looking at how clearing and settlement arrangements for repos work and have worked during the economic crisis. It looks at issues that may affect resilience of repo markets and suggests ideas for strengthening them.

Treasury is consulting on implementation of the changes to the Settlement Finality Directive (SFD) and the Financial Collateral Directive (FCD) in the UK. The changes to the Directives cover:

Treasury has announced the next stage of withdrawal of government support for Northern Rock. It will end its guarantee on wholesale liabilities in three months' time, earlier than planned.

Parliament made a resolution calling on the Commission to adopt draft laws before the end of the year to help manage cross-border institutional crises. The measures should provide a common minimum set of rules, encourage convergence of national resolution and insolvency laws, and ultimately establish an EU resolution and insolvency regime. Parliament wants to see more crisis management powers to supervisory authorities, probably coordinated by the new European Banking Authority (EBA) (which takes over from CEBS).

FSA has censured a firm in voluntary liquidation for failings in selling and promoting geared traded endowment policies. Integrity Financial Solutions provided and advised on the policies. FSA found the product information it produced was misleading, which may have led IFAs to advise customers to buy an unsuitable product. It also found the firm’s own sales arm did not record information on customers and could not evidence why the product was suitable. FSA would have recommended a £350,000 fine if the firm were not in liquidation.

FSA made five sets of new rules at its March board meeting:

Treasury is consulting on how to improve protection and payment of benefits for policyholders of insurers who get into financial difficulty. Historically, few insurers have been put into administration or liquidation, and none have been so seriously affected in the recent crisis. So Treasury thinks it is time to review the regime and suggests changes that would:

FSA has published the statement it made to the US bankruptcy court examiner on the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. It has published the statement in the public interest, although it contains information that would otherwise have been confidential. The statement explains FSA’s actions and conversations in respect of the potential purchase by Barclays of the company in September 2008.