Insolvency and restructuring specialists in the U.K. are preparing for a flurry of activity as supply chain issues, spiraling energy costs and rising inflation trigger a wave of corporate distress and bankruptcies, the Telegram reported. The signs are already ominous. During the first three months of the year, around 137,000 businesses closed their doors for good in the UK, a jump of nearly a quarter on the same period in 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

An already tough year for sterling corporate credit may get worse as Prime Minister Boris Johnson faces a crunch no-confidence vote, Bloomberg News reported. Borrowing costs for UK companies are at the highest since 2014, while an index of sterling corporate credit is on its longest losing run ever, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. With surging inflation and an uncertain economic outlook on the horizon, what markets don’t need right now is more uncertainty.

Stablecoins that are meant to be an alternative to traditional currencies aren’t steady enough for widespread use by consumers, a Bank of England official said, Bloomberg News reported. Andrew Hauser, executive director for markets at the UK central bank, said the digital currencies such as TerraUSD and Tether lack real-time information about their value and details about how they maintain convertibility. “Stable they are not,” Hauser said Wednesday in a text of remarks prepared for a panel hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

British sporting goods billionaire Mike Ashley swooped on another failing retailer, snapping up online brand Missguided after it entered UK insolvency proceedings, BusinessofFashion.com reported. Ashley’s Frasers Group Plc agreed to pay £20 million ($25 million) for the intellectual property of Missguided and related companies, according to a statement Wednesday. Missguided was founded in 2009 and sells clothes online to young women, targeting them via its 9.2 million Instagram followers.

Britain set out sweeping reforms of big company audits on Tuesday after high-profile collapses at builder Carillion and retailer BHS in recent years hit thousands of jobs and raised questions about accounting quality, Reuters reported. The business ministry detailed changes to auditing and corporate governance that will be put into law, though the measures are unlikely to come into force until 2024 or later and smaller firms will be shielded from the new rules.

The British government said it would use a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies to help raise funds for direct payments to households, totaling about 15 billion pounds (about $19 billion), to ease the country’s cost-of-living crisis, the New York Times reported. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor of the Exchequer, announced the measures on Thursday as the government has come under increasingly intense pressure to help households with rapidly rising inflation and energy bills. Mr.

Boris Becker has reportedly been transferred to a prison used to detain foreign criminals, indicating he will be deported from the UK at the end of his sentence, the Guardian reported. According to the Times, Becker’s lawyer told journalists in Berlin that he had been transferred to HMP Huntercombe in Oxfordshire. The former world No. 1 tennis player had been detained at Wandsworth prison, a category B prison, after he was jailed for two and a half years for concealing £2.5m of assets to avoid paying money he owed after his bankruptcy. He will serve half of the sentence.

The European Union will not give a new mandate to renegotiate post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland agreed as part of the Brexit deal, the bloc's ambassador to London said on Thursday, Reuters reported. Britain is lining up a new law that would effectively override parts of a Brexit deal and has said that the bloc's refusal to budge on its negotiating mandate for the talks is "hugely disappointing". Speaking at an event in Westminster, the EU ambassador, João Vale de Almeida, said that the EU would stick to its existing mandate for the talks with Britain.

Too many global investment banks continue to serve euro zone clients out of London and the European Central Bank plans to force them to relocate senior staff and trading activity to the bloc, ECB supervisory chief Andrea Enria said on Thursday, Reuters reported. The ECB has long battled the industry's biggest players, who are reluctant to relocate activities after Brexit, despite explicit demands by the ECB, which supervises the bloc's biggest financial institutions.

The U.K. is due to become the first big European economy to reach pre-pandemic levels of corporate insolvencies as crisis support is unwound and rising inflation threatens companies’ survival prospects, according to research, the London Times reported. Business insolvencies will rise by 37 per cent this year, Allianz Trade, a credit insurer, predicted. It cited as the main causes the withdrawal of Covid support schemes, rising commodity prices, supply chain problems, the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the “lagging effects” of Brexit.