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.

British inflation surged last month to its highest annual rate since 1982, pressuring finance minister Rishi Sunak to offer more help for households and the Bank of England to keep raising interest rates despite a risk of recession, Reuters reported. Consumer price inflation hit 9% in April, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday, surpassing the peaks of the early 1990s recession that many Britons remember for sky-high interest rates and widespread mortgage defaults.

European Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic said on Tuesday the EU had significant concerns about the announcement by the UK government to enable legislation that would disapply basic elements of the Northern Ireland protocol, Reuters reported. "Unilateral actions are not acceptable," Sefcovic said in a statement. Sefcovic added that should the UK decide to move ahead with the bill, the EU would need to respond with all measures at its disposal.