Britain had an 8 billion-pound ($13.2 billion) budget deficit in July, the largest for the month since records began in 1993, as the recession ravaged tax revenue and the cost of unemployment benefits surged, Bloomberg reported. The shortfall compared with a surplus of 5.2 billion pounds a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics said in London today. It came in a month when the Treasury usually gets a boost from quarterly tax payments. Britain last had a deficit in July in 1996. The U.K.

Britain’s Serious Fraud Office is to meet with Icelandic investigators in London next month as Reykjavik seeks international help to discover whether criminal wrongdoing played a role in bringing down Iceland’s banking sector, the Financial Times reported. The talks signal increasing co-operation between the UK and Iceland over the corruption probe, even as tensions flare between the two countries over a disputed deal to repay billions of pounds lost by British savers in Icelandic banks.

Bankers are calling for a new London panel to help smooth the restructuring of hundreds of billions of pounds of debt and prevent further ugly fights before courts between lenders, Reuters reported. The group, modelled on the Takeover Panel, would help prevent complex debt workouts being decided before courts, as the number of defaults soars. The restructuring panel would be most useful in cases where a minority of lenders are unreasonably holding out on the other lenders, said Andrew Speirs, managing director at London advisory firm Hawkpoint.

Bankers are calling for a new London panel to help smooth the restructuring of hundreds of billions of pounds of debt and prevent further ugly fights before courts between lenders, Reuters reported. The group, modelled on the Takeover Panel, would help prevent complex debt workouts being decided before courts, as the number of defaults soars. The restructuring panel would be most useful in cases where a minority of lenders are unreasonably holding out on the other lenders, said Andrew Speirs, managing director at London advisory firm Hawkpoint.

Zinc companies in Peru, the world’s third-largest producer, will look to sell more concentrates overseas after the government said smelter Doe Run Peru may file for bankruptcy, according to a creditor, Bloomberg reported. A bankruptcy may take months to complete, said Carlos Galvez, chief financial officer of precious metals producer Cia. de Minas Buenaventura SA, a Doe Run Peru creditor. Doe Run, a unit of Renco Group Inc., may file for bankruptcy to restructure about $156 million of debt, Energy & Mines Minister Pedro Sanchez Gamarra said yesterday.

British coffee retailer Coffee Republic said on Thursday its operating business had been bought out of administration by Arab Investment Ltd, a property firm best known for plans to build a London skyscraper, Reuters reported. Arab Investments said in a separate statement that it planned to expand the business, which currently includes 80 outlets -- around 60 in Britain and the rest in countries including Bulgaria and Saudi Arabia. Read more.

Northern Rock Plc shareholders lost a court bid seeking compensation from the British government for stock they claim was rendered worthless when the U.K. bank was nationalized last year, Bloomberg reported. A three-judge panel at the Court of Appeal in London today threw out a lawsuit filed by hedge funds SRM Global, RAB Capital Plc and a group of private investors. They had sought a judicial review of the way the shares will be valued by the government. Northern Rock shares peaked at 1,251 pence in February 2007, and closed at 90 pence on Feb. 15, 2008, when they were suspended.

Strains in pensions systems, in both private and public provision, threaten to turn the financial crisis of the past two years into a social crisis lasting for decades, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warned on Tuesday. In its annual analysis of the health of pensions systems globally, the Paris-based organisation found private pension plans lost 23 per cent of their value last year, while higher unemployment “leaves little room for more generous public pensions”, the Financial Times reported.

The Chinese government’s largest investment ever in a Western company, a proposed $19.5 billion stake in the Australian-British mining giant Rio Tinto Group, collapsed early Friday, dealing a blow both to China’s global corporate ambitions and to its efforts to gain clout in the natural resources market, The New York Times reported. The board of Rio Tinto announced the decision after meeting in London on Thursday, saying the company had ended the deal it struck in February to sell the stake to China’s state-owned Aluminum Corporation of China, also known as Chinalco.

Shares in British banks fell on Thursday after it emerged that the economic assumptions used to test whether some of the biggest institutions could withstand a deep recession may have been less severe than assumed in financial markets, the Financial Times reported. The Financial Services Authority, the City of London watchdog, published details of the worst-case economic scenarios used to test the capital strength of banks including Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and Lloyds.