A group of Thames Water’s creditors including BlackRock Inc. and Elliott Investment Management LP formed a coordination committee as talks kicked off with the struggling utility over options to restructure its debt load, Bloomberg News reported. The committee formed last week is part of a larger group of creditors who are being advised by investment bank Jefferies and law firm Akin Gump, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing private information. The broader group holds about £8.5 billion ($10.9 billion) of Thames Water debt.

Selina Networks filed for bankruptcy on Monday, citing a 95% drop in stock value since its IPO, massive debts, and an inability to meet financial obligations with its investors, the company informed the Inter-American Development Bank, YnetNews.com reported. Listed on NASDAQ 18 months ago with a valuation of $1.2 billion, Selina's stock price has plummeted by 99%, leaving the company valued at about $20 million. Facing potential delisting from NASDAQ, the company's stock price has fallen below the minimum threshold.

Scotland’s corporate insolvencies dipped by 3.1% in Q1 2024-2025 compared to the previous fiscal year, totaling 283, Scottish Financial News reported. Despite this decrease, figures are still 17.9% higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Britain's information watchdog has rejected a Reuters appeal to identify lenders who have lost or surrendered state guarantees on millions of pounds of COVID-19 emergency loans, citing potential harm to their commercial interests, Reuters reported. Reuters revealed in November that government guarantees on about 1 billion pounds ($1.3 billion) of pandemic-era loans to stricken businesses had been scrapped, based on data obtained under a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the British Business Bank (BBB), which oversees the emergency lending schemes.

England and Wales recorded the second-highest number of company insolvencies since 2009 last month, government figures showed, reflecting high interest rates and increased costs caused by rapid inflation in 2022 and 2023, Reuters reported. June saw 2,361 company insolvencies on a seasonally adjusted basis, Britain's Insolvency Service agency said, 17% more than a year earlier and the most since May 2023. The high total partly reflects an increase in the overall number of companies.

U.K. shoppers turned away from retail outlets last month, after highs in May, amid election jitters and poor weather, the Wall Street Journal reported. Retail sales volumes declined 1.2% on month in June, undoing some of the 2.9% rise in May, according to the Office for National Statistics. The data comes after consumer-confidence figures showed only a marginal improvement on month in July, as British people showed caution about how the new U.K. government would affect the economy and their finances.

Britain added 11 new shipping sanctions under its Russia sanctions regime related to the war in Ukraine, an official notice showed on Thursday, SwissInfo.ch reported. The government said the sanctions on ships including Zaliv Amurskiy and SCF Pechora relate to the carrying of oil or oil products from Russia to a third country. The ships are believed to have the flags of Panama, Gabon and the Cook Islands, the government notice said.

Wage rises in the U.K. cooled in the three months to May, after months of stubbornly high growth, keeping an August interest-rate cut in play at the Bank of England, the Wall Street Journal reported. Average earnings, excluding bonuses, between March and May were 5.7% higher than a year earlier, down from 6.0% in the three months to April, according to data from the Office for National Statistics published Thursday.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves warned “difficult decisions” lie ahead as she tries to fix Britain’s public finances, raising the prospect of tax hikes or spending cuts in her first Budget in the autumn, Bloomberg News reported. Reeves, who is the UK’s first female finance minister, said she will update Parliament this month on her fiscal inheritance from the Conservatives and will also set a date for a Budget that will define Labour’s opening period in office.