High numbers of bosses are “cashing out” of their businesses by liquidating companies when they are still solvent, business recovery experts have said, the Daily Echo reported. Portland Leonard Curtis paid out more than £26million in 2021 through members’ voluntary liquidations (MVL) of 76 businesses, including local firms and national brands.

British consumer prices rose at the fastest annual pace in nearly 30 years last month, intensifying the squeeze on households and reinforcing the chances that the Bank of England will raise interest rates for a third meeting in a row, Reuters reported. The annual rate of consumer price inflation rose to 5.5% in January, the highest since March 1992, when Britain was emerging from a long period of inflation-feeding high wage deals. This was above most economists' forecasts in a Reuters poll for it to hold at December's 5.4% rate.

Britain's financial watchdog said on Monday it had told four 'buy now pay later' firms (BNPL) to change their contracts after identifying "potential harms" to consumers, Reuters reported. BNPL firms, which are unregulated, typically offer on-the-spot interest-free short-term loans that spread payments for retail goods like clothing. The market more than trebled in size during 2020 to 2.7 billion pounds ($3.65 billion), when COVID-19 lockdowns saw more people struggling to make ends meet. "The four firms involved, Clearpay, Klarna, Laybuy and Openpay, have fully cooperated with our work.

The sudden emergence of the fast-spreading Omicron variant of the coronavirus in Britain late last year stalled the country’s economic recovery, data confirmed on Friday, though the impact was milder than expected, the New York Times reported. Britain’s gross domestic product fell 0.2 percent in December from the previous month, the Office for National Statistics said, as the government told people to work from home where possible. High case numbers and voluntary social distancing led to a wave of cancellations for restaurants, bars, theaters and other social activities.

The Bank of England has begun talks with the U.K. Debt Management Office and the Treasury over how to handle active sales of bonds held in its quantitative easing portfolio, Bloomberg News reported. The discussions come as the central bank last week said it would begin running down its 875 billion pounds ($1.2 trillion) of government bond holdings for the first time by letting expired gilts fall off its balance sheet, and reiterated it would consider active sales once interest rates hit 1%.

As much as £20 billion of taxpayer-backed Covid loans may have to be written off because of defaults by struggling borrowers, insolvency practitioners have warned, the London Times reported. The resignation of Lord Agnew of Oulton, the counter-fraud minister, has prompted an increased scrutiny of losses to criminals in the government’s emergency schemes, but Azets, an accountancy firm, has warned that these will be eclipsed by the hit to the public purse from legitimate borrowers going bust.

KPMG has been sued for 1.3 billion pounds ($1.77 billion) by the liquidators of Carillion for missing "red flags" during audits of the construction giant, in one of the largest claims against one of the world's top accountants, Reuters reported. Britain's Official Receiver, part of the Insolvency Service, which is liquidating the former blue-chip group, alleged that negligent failures by KPMG to detect misstatements in the accounts of Carillion - which collapsed in 2018 under 7 billion pounds of debt - cost claimants "extensive loss and damage".

Prices are rising steeply in the United States and across Europe, driven by rising energy costs and supply-chain issues triggered by the easing of pandemic rules. But in Britain, there is a fear that sharply escalating heat and electricity bills, combined with food inflation, will push millions more into poverty, the New York Times reported. The Bank of England lifted interest rates on Thursday for the second time in two months — moving before the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank.

Bondholders of fertilizer producer CF Industries Holdings Inc. agreed to amend the company’s debt covenants, clearing a path for it to restructure its troubled U.K. operations, Bloomberg News reported. Bondholders agreed to let CF Industries remove its U.K. units from the definition of a “substantial subsidiary” in exchange for a $2 fee per $1,000 of principal on four different outstanding bond issues, the company said in a regulatory filing Tuesday. In a previous filing, the Deerfield, Illinois-based manufacturer said it sought to change the definition so that restructuring its U.K.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a raft of measures as the U.K. government sought to get a grip on a burgeoning cost-of-living crisis, with millions of Britons facing record increases in their energy bills, Bloomberg News reported. “The government is going to step in to directly help people manage those extra costs,” Sunak said in the House of Commons on Thursday, saying his intervention was worth 9 billion pounds ($12 billion).