Credit Suisse Group AG won the green light to pursue its court battle against companies controlled by Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance, in a dispute over more than a billion dollars in debts to the bank, Bloomberg News reported. A London judge said that the Swiss lender’s attempt to wind up three of Gupta’s firms can proceed, saying the GFG companies couldn’t rely on rules designed to protect companies during the coronavirus pandemic. “The demands made on the companies over a year ago have not been met,” Judge Nicholas Briggs said in his ruling.

The Financial Reporting Council fined PricewaterhouseCoopers on Tuesday after the U.K. audit and accounting regulator found issues with the firm’s audits of two construction groups, the Wall Street Journal reported. The FRC said it imposed sanctions of roughly £5 million—equivalent to about $6.3 million—for failings in PwC’s audits of Galliford Try Holdings PLC and Kier Group PLC, which have market caps of around £191 million and £345 million, respectively. PwC in a statement expressed regret that certain audits weren’t up to standards and said it has worked to improve audit quality.

Relocating euro clearing from London to the European Union must be "market-led" rather than mandatory, with the shift already well underway, the head of Eurex Clearing said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. After Brexit, the European Union has said it will not allow EU market participants to clear euro derivatives in London after June 2025, citing a need to end its heavy reliance on that market in the same way the bloc is cutting dependency on Russian energy.

Britain will begin live testing of crypto blockchain technology for traditional market activities such as trading and settlement of stocks and bonds next year as part of a drive to become a global "crypto hub", the finance ministry said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Gwyneth Nurse, the ministry's director general for financial services, said the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT), which underpins cryptoassets, is a key priority for making financial market infrastructure more innovative and efficient for users.

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.