The UK is planning for several days over the winter when cold weather may combine with gas shortages, leading to organized blackouts for industry and even households, Bloomberg News reported. Under the government’s latest “reasonable worst-case scenario,” Britain could face an electricity capacity shortfall totaling about a sixth of peak demand, even after emergency coal plants have been fired up, according to people familiar with the government’s planning.

The Bank of England will probably have to raise interest rates further from their current 14 year-high to tackle inflation pressures that are gaining a foothold in Britain's economy, BoE Deputy Governor Dave Ramsden said, Reuters reported. Inflation's spread was now showing up in rising British pay and companies' pricing plans, having originally been triggered by the reopening of the world economy from COVID-19 lockdowns and then by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ramsden told Reuters.

A top arranger for Chinese junk dollar bonds says that a type of filing under the US bankruptcy code will play an important role for China’s distressed developers to restructure debt, buying them time to pay back creditors until markets recover, Bloomberg news reported. About 10 Chinese real estate companies could use so-called schemes of arrangement to restructure debt in a holistic fashion this year, Chen Yi, head of global capital markets at Haitong International Securities Group Ltd., said in an interview.

The British government came under pressure on Monday to set out plans immediately to support families through a mounting cost of living crisis, with a leading business group and former prime minister saying a political vacuum cannot be allowed to last, Reuters reported. The Bank of England warned on Thursday a long recession was on its way as energy prices surge to unprecedented levels, pushing inflation to a 40-year high of 9.4% in June and leaving many households on the brink of economic hardship.

Brexit-related regulatory burdens impacted more than half of medium-sized businesses in the Republic in 2020, according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO), the Irish Times reported. The agency’s latest Global Value Chain participation survey found that 54 per cent of businesses here with 50 or more employees were hit by new regulations arising from the UK’s EU exit. Despite the red tape, the UK remained the most popular location for Irish businesses for both global purchasing and supplying of goods/materials and services.

Britain's accounting watchdog said on Monday it had fined auditor PwC 1.75 million pounds ($2.12 million) after it failed to properly challenge UK telecoms group BT once a half-a-billion pound fraud was discovered in BT's Italian operations, Reuters reported. BT's full-year financial statement for the year ended March 31, 2017, had to be adjusted by 513 million pounds due to the fraud, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) said.

Insurers would potentially be able to use billions of pounds of expected gains from a relaxation of capital rules for share buybacks and to pay dividends, under plans by both candidates to succeed Boris Johnson as UK prime minister, Bloomberg News reported. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak have both said overhauling Solvency II capital requirements, a legacy of the UK’s European Union membership, is a key part of a drive to boost the UK’s competitiveness.

A London judge has told Kazakh mining company ENRC, its former legal adviser Dechert and the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to consider mediation to end bitter litigation over events that led to a near 10-year criminal investigation, Reuters reported. Despite ruling in May that former veteran Dechert partner Neil Gerrard had grossly betrayed his own client and former senior SFO officers had behaved with bad faith, High Court Judge David Waksman suggested all sides call a truce. "Notwithstanding what's happened in the past and the serious allegations ...

The Bank of England raised interest rates by half a percentage point on Thursday, the largest jump since 1995, as policymakers strengthened their efforts to tackle inflation even as they warned Britain was heading into a long recession later this year, the New York Times reported. The bank raised rates to 1.75 percent, the highest since 2008, from 1.25 percent as it forecast the annual rate of inflation would climb above 13 percent when household energy bills jump higher in October. That would be the highest level of inflation in 42 years.

Rising energy and fuel bills are driving growing numbers of UK companies into insolvency, as firms struggle to cope with higher costs, supply and staff shortages, and the withdrawal of Covid support packages from the government, the Guardian reported. Corporate insolvencies in England and Wales jumped by more than 80% in the past quarter from a year earlier, while the number of firms opting to be liquidated hit the highest level in at least six decades. They accounted for almost nine in 10 of the total.