Hundreds of Google employees staged a walkout at the company’s London offices on Tuesday, following a dispute over layoffs, Reuters reported. In January, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced it was laying off 12,000 employees worldwide, equivalent to 6% of its global workforce. The move came amid a wave of job cuts across corporate America, particularly in the tech sector, which has so far seen companies shed more than 290,000 workers since the start of the year, according to tracking site Layoffs.fyi.
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The cinema chain has announced that it will no longer be selling its U.K., Irish and U.S. locations despite filing for bankruptcy protection last year, the (U.K.) Gazette and Herald reported. The global company operates brands like Cinema City, Picturehouse, Regal and Planet with 750 locations around the world. On Monday, April 3, it announced that it has now terminated the planned sale after struggling to find an acceptable offer. Instead, the chain will go under financial restructuring of its approximately £4 billion debt pile.
Former Liverpool star and current Burnley assistant manager Craig Bellamy has declared bankruptcy after a series of failed investments, Liverpool World reported. The Welshman played for Liverpool 79 times across two turbulent one-year stays at Anfield. Bellamy first joined Liverpool in June 2006 when the Merseyside club paid £6 million for his services from West Ham.
The U.K. government said it would hire 475 financial crime investigators and change laws around corporate crime as part of a new plan to crack down on economic crime, the Wall Street Journal reported. The three-year plan, unveiled Thursday, calls for new spending of £400 million, equivalent to $495 million, at several government agencies—£200 million of which will come from the government and £200 million from a levy on the private sector. The government will make a £100 million investment in data analytics and other technology to aid law enforcement.
Recharge Industries Pty Ltd's attempt to buy the Britishvolt site is at risk of collapsing due to a dispute with administrator EY over a power supply contract signed by the failed battery startup, the Financial Times reported. Australia-based Recharge Industries and the British accounting firm hit an impasse over payments related to transferring a grid connection contract with the UK's National Grid, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Rocket-maker Virgin Orbit Holdings on Thursday said it was laying off about 85% of staff because it had not been able to raise new investment, Reuters reported. Shares of the company, which is controlled by Richard Branson's Virgin Group, fell 38% in after hours trade. About 675 employees will lose their jobs, and the company expects to take related charges of about $15 million, Virgin Orbit said in a regulatory filing. The move was the result of "the company's inability to secure meaningful funding," the filing said.
Cineworld Group Plc is set to submit its bankruptcy-exit plan on Wednesday after reaching a deal with creditors to trim billions of dollars of debt from its balance sheet, according to a lawyer for the company, Bloomberg News reported. Cineworld expects to file the plan alongside a restructuring support agreement — a deal in which a troubled company’s key creditors agree to back a debt-cutting proposal. Both agreements should be filed publicly on Wednesday, Josh Sussberg, a bankruptcy lawyer for Cineworld, said in a court hearing Tuesday.
The Bank of England on Wednesday told regulators to move fast to toughen rules for funds used by Britain's pension industry which nearly collapsed last year after former Prime Minister Liz's Truss's "mini-budget," Reuters reported. The BoE said Britain's banking system was not at risk from the kind of turmoil that has beset some banks in the United States and Switzerland's Credit Suisse. But the BoE's Financial Policy Committee called on the Pensions Regulator to act "as soon as possible" to mitigate the risks posed by liability-driven investment (LDI) funds.
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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said on Tuesday that creditor hierarchy was a "cardinal principle" and in Britain additional tier one (AT1) bondholders would not be treated as they were in the emergency takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS, Reuters reported. "In any resolution we will always abide by the code of hierarchy because that's a cardinal principle," he told a committee of lawmakers.
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The Bank of England raised interest rates by a quarter-point on Thursday, its 11th consecutive rate increase, a day after data showed that Britain’s inflation rate unexpectedly increased last month, the New York Times reported. The central bank also affirmed that Britain’s banking system was “resilient” and able to withstand a period of higher interest rates, according to the minutes of this week’s meeting.
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