More than a third of British hospitality companies are at risk of going bust, according to a survey on Thursday that suggested more support will be needed for businesses amid a resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic, Reuters reported. The Office for National Statistics said 17% of food and accommodation businesses reported a “severe” risk of insolvency, while a further 21% said the risk was “moderate”.

Britain’s government borrowing in the first half of the financial year was more than six times higher than before the COVID pandemic, official figures showed on Wednesday, taking public debt to its highest since 1960, Reuters reported. Public borrowing in September alone totalled 36.101 billion pounds ($46.90 billion), above all forecasts in a Reuters poll of economists, although August’s figure was revised down by more than 5 billion pounds to 30.113 billion pounds.

Petra Diamonds has abandoned plans to sell the business in favour of a debt-for-equity restructuring, it said on Tuesday, sending its shares lower because of the deal's dilutive effect on existing stakeholders, Reuters reported. The London-listed company, which mines diamonds in South Africa and Tanzania, had put itself up for sale in June as part of the restructuring process but has received no viable offers, it said.

A month-on-month rise in the number of corporate insolvencies in England and Wales may indicate that businesses which were healthy and profitable pre-COVID-19 are now starting to struggle, East Midlands Business Link reported. This is according to the Midlands branch of insolvency and restructuring trade body R3 and comes on the back of figures published by the Government’s Insolvency Service which show that the number of companies entering insolvency increased to 926 in September 2020 compared to August’s figure of 784.

Businesses are being set up in the UK at a record rate, according to the government’s register of national corporate activity, as criminals attempting Covid-related fraud establish companies alongside entrepreneurs creating new ventures, the Financial Times reported. Senior bankers have raised concerns that criminals have formed companies to take out lightly checked government-backed loans. The National Audit Office this month warned that tens of billions could be lost through fraud and defaults.

The English High Court appointed Ben Cairns and Richard Fleming of Alvarez & Marsal as joint administrators of NMC Health on 9 April 2020, but NMC Health’s operating subsidiaries in the Middle East, including its 36 UAE-incorporated subsidiaries (the NMC Companies), are not within the jurisdiction of the English courts and are not part of the English administration process, JD Supra reported. On 27 September 2020, however, the Courts of Abu Dhabi Global Market (the ADGM Courts) placed the NMC Companies into administration and appointed Ben Cairns and Richard Fleming as administrators.

Banks are putting the brakes on U.K. commercial real estate lending as the pandemic batters the economy and stokes fears about looming defaults, Bloomberg News reported. New loans declined in the first half by 34% from a year earlier to 15.5 billion pounds ($20.2 billion), according to a report from The Business School in the City of London. More than a fifth of lenders surveyed said they made no new commercial property loans in the period. The coronavirus has plunged the U.K. into a painful recession.

Up to £26bn in expected defaults and fraud losses on bounce back loans is a very big number, the Financial Times reported. The National Audit Office’s estimate is a measure of the banks’ success as government functionaries shelling out cash to rescue more than 1m small businesses during the pandemic. It could also be a measure of the banks’ potential failure. After all, £26bn out of £43bn in bounce back loans is a lot to pursue in a year or so when payments start to fall due. That won’t make debt collectors popular. Debt collecting hasn’t made banks popular in the past.

EasyJet’s losses soared to more than £800m this year, sending the low-cost airline into the red for the first time in its 25-year history, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to threaten the future of companies across the global travel industry, the Financial Times reported. In a sign of increasing desperation for airlines, easyJet chief executive Johan Lundgren urged the British government to prop up the sector further as the company slashes winter flight schedules because of plunging passenger demand.

The UK’s economic recovery faltered in September due to the Eat Out to Help Out scheme ending and the renewal of lockdown restrictions, Business Sale Report reported. Business profits remained unchanged from a month earlier, down 21 per cent, while businesses on average reported that profits were down 42 per cent on what they would normally expect for the month of September. According to the Opinium-Cebr Business Distress Tracker, 35 per cent of businesses said that trading conditions were good at the end of September, down from 39 per cent a month earlier.