A pioneering Scottish seaweed product maker has been placed into administration, HeraldScotland.com reported. The trade and assets of the Oban-based company have been sold, but half of the small workforce was lost. The Oceanium Limited business, producing farmed seaweed-derived bioactive and food ingredients, has been acquired by Juno Mara Limited following an independent marketing process.

EasyJet has agreed to a £5.7bn takeover by Apollo after the US private equity giant swooped in on a rival deal, The Telegraph reported. Apollo's surprise cash offer of 715p per share for easyJet comfortably outbid a 690p-per-share agreement with Castlelake, which valued the carrier at £5.2bn. After Apollo's offer, the airline's board said it was "no longer minded to recommend the Castlelake proposal". It is not yet clear whether the private credit firm will return with an improved bid. It offered no comment on Apollo's gatecrashing of its deal on Friday.

Some of the world's ‌biggest carmakers on Friday ‌broadly won the first stage of ​a mammoth legal battle over whether some of their diesel vehicles contained ‌prohibited "defeat devices" ⁠which limited emissions control systems, Reuters reported. Judge Sara Cockerill ⁠said in a summary of her ruling that ​she had "rejected ​most of ​the principal ‌allegations advanced against the manufacturers whose vehicles were examined at trial", though she said she had made some ‌adverse findings.

Hedge funds are fuelling a stock market bubble by using billions of dollars in debt to drive up AI valuations, the Bank of England has warned, The Telegraph reported. The Bank's committee tasked with monitoring where the next financial crisis will come from warned that there has been a "significant rise" in hedge funds borrowing to invest in AI stocks. In a new report, the Bank said: "Equity prices have increased especially for AI-related stocks.

London is the most exposed city in the developed world to a looming AI jobs bloodbath, according to a new report, The Telegraph reported. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) warned that the capital had the highest proportion of roles under threat from generative AI, with three in four jobs at risk "now or in the near future". This outstrips all other cities across the developed world, including America's major economic hubs, New York and San Francisco, as well as European capitals such as Paris and Berlin.

The Insolvency Service’s new taskforce to tackle “abusive phoenixism” by rogue directors cannot alone address an £800 million tax-loss problem without broader policy changes, an agency director has said, The Times reported. The chancellor committed £25 million over five years in November’s budget to fund a 50-person unit to investigate suspicious company insolvencies. The funding is designed to investigate directors who deliberately liquidate or dissolve their companies to evade tax and write off their debts.

A family-run UK haulage and freight firm has collapsed into liquidation in yet another significant blow to the UK transport industry following conflicts in the Middle East. JKM Transport Solutions Ltd appointed administrators on June 29, with the news published in the Edinburgh Gazette on July 3, Mirror.co.uk reported. George Lafferty, of BTG Begbies Traynor (Central) LLP, has been named as the liquidator overseeing the company. Companies House confirms the business has filed for insolvency, with a winding-up order commencing on 29th June.

U.K. credit card defaults have reached their highest level since the global financial crisis as households struggle with financial pressures from the war in Iran, The Telegraph reported. Bank of England data show that in the three months to June, banks experienced the largest increase in the number of people falling behind on their credit card debt since the third quarter of 2009. Experts warned that the figures paint a grim picture for household finances as consumers grapple with rising fuel costs and worries about a fresh bout of inflation.