A liquidator has been appointed for the bankrupt charity that ran two public leisure centres in Lincoln, BBC.com reported. Yarborough and Birchwood leisure centres closed on 3 April after Active Nation ceased trading. Stockport-based firm Beesley Corporate Recovery has been appointed to handle the charity's insolvency process. Both facilities are expected to fully reopen by mid-July after City of Lincoln Council, which owns the buildings, chose charitable social enterprise Greenwich Leisure Limited (GLL) as the interim operator for them.

Builder's merchant Blanchford Building Supplies racked up debts of more than £3.3million to suppliers before it fell into administration, YahooNews.com reported. The 75-year-old Headington-based business closed down ‘without warning’ earlier this year without giving any reason. All four of Blanchford's shops in Bicester, Wallingford, Princes Risborough and Haddenham closed on February 14. Timothy Townley and Danny Dartnaill, of business restructuring specialist BDO LLP, were appointed as joint administrators in mid-February.

Few British businesses now expect to be directly affected by recent changes in U.S. trade policy, with only 12% naming it as one of their top three sources of uncertainty, down from 22% a month earlier, a Bank of England survey showed on Thursday, Reuters reported. U.S. President Donald Trump announced wide-ranging tariffs on imports to the United States in early April. Britain secured a partial exemption from the tariffs in early May, although the details are still to be finalised. The BoE said 70% of businesses surveyed in May as part of its monthly Decision Maker Panel expected that U.S.

Thames Water suffered a major setback in its fight to avoid nationalisation on Tuesday as it said U.S. private equity firm KKR had pulled out of a multi-billion pound rescue plan, Reuters reported. Britain's biggest water supplier has been pushed to the edge by its 18 billion pound ($24.35 billion) debt pile, and was banking on KKR investing about 4 billion pounds in new equity to effectively buy the company. The government has said that it is on standby in case Thames Water fails to recapitalise and needs to be temporarily nationalised in order to keep services running.

Three community centres are to be handed back to a city council after the charity running them announced it was folding, BBC.com reported. The Newcastle Community Asset Trust (NCAT) managed community hubs in Fawdon, Cowgate, and Blakelaw, with the latter also housing a post office which had to temporarily close. The charity blamed rising costs, reduced funding and the long-term impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic for its "painful" decision. Newcastle City Council confirmed all three centres would remain open and "accessible to tenants and residents as normal".

Yurtel, based in Corsham, Wiltshire, has revealed that it has gone bankrupt, meaning that all bookings will not be fulfilled after it ceased trading on May 8, the County Gazette reported. Yurtel have previously supplied accommodation for people who visit Glastonbury Festival since 2005, prices for hospitality tickets and accommodation packages from the Yurtel company ranged from £10,000 up to £16,500 for this year's festival.

Ownership of The Daily Telegraph, the storied British newspaper long considered close to the country’s Conservative Party, is poised to change — again, the New York Times reported. RedBird Capital Partners, an American investment firm, said on Friday that it had reached an agreement in principle to buy control of the newspaper’s parent company, Telegraph Media Group, at a valuation of 500 million pounds, or about $675 million.

When Builder.ai was seeking an emergency loan in 2024, the start-up gave lenders a revenue forecast that proved to be four times its actual sales, Bloomberg News reported. A group of creditors, led by Israeli firm Viola Credit, were originally told that Builder.ai projected sales of US$220 million (S$284 million) for 2024, the people said. The company later disclosed that the actual revenue amount for the year turned out to be about US$50 million. That revelation was one of the factors that ultimately led the lenders to seize most of the UK-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up’s cash.

U.K. retail sales jumped higher than expected last month, a result of warmer weather that helped food stores bounce back, the Wall Street Journal reported. Retail sales volumes climbed 1.2% on month in April after a 0.1% rise in March, the Office for National Statistics said Friday. It was a fourth-straight monthly increase, the first time that has happened since mid-2020 after businesses reopened following the first Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns.