United Kingdom

PIK Group, one of Russia’s largest residential construction companies, plunged as much as 43 percent in London on Monday after JPMorgan Chase & Co. downgraded the developer to "underweight" from "overweight" on concern that it may default on some debt, The Moscow Times reported today. The developer may be unable to repay $700 million of debt due this year as the Moscow city government seeks to overturn housing orders PIK won in October and renegotiate prices, Elena Jouronova, a property analyst at JPMorgan in Moscow, wrote in a note to clients Monday.

Administrators of the European arm of failed investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. are meeting with creditors in London on Friday to sketch out the group's assets and liabilities, The Straits Times reported today. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which was drafted in as administrator to Lehman Brothers International (Europe) to unravel the complex web of the firm's tens of thousands of trades and attempt to claw back funds for creditors, said it will provide an update after the meeting.

Individual bankruptcies in Britain jumped 9.5 percent in the third quarter from last year, while company insolvencies rose 26 percent as the financial crisis hiked the cost of loans, official figures showed Friday. Britain's Office for National Statistics said 17,341 people declared bankruptcy in the three months through September, up from 15,842 in the same quarter of 2007, the Associated Press reported today. The number of bankruptcies was 12 percent higher than it was in the previous quarter.

Britain-based porcelain maker Royal Worcester & Spode Ltd. has gone into bankruptcy, the Associated Press reported yesterday. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP said it had been appointed to administer the company, which manufactures and sells earthware and china products. The company employs 388 people in Britain and has a site in the U.S. state of New Jersey. PricewaterhouseCoopers said the company's U.S. subsidiary was outside its formal administration regime but that it would coordinate its moves with the American management team.