A deadline for bids for the stricken British Steel has been pushed back to the end of the month to allow prospective buyers more time to prepare offers, according to people briefed on the matter, the Financial Times reported. The official receiver overseeing the liquidation of the UK’s second-largest steelmaker had originally called for bids to be made by next Wednesday 12th June, but this has now been extended until around the 30th, said three people.

Philip Green’s Arcadia fashion group adjourned Wednesday’s creditor meetings to vote on the struggling British retailer’s restructuring plan until June 12, seeking more time to win over disgruntled landlords and avoid a collapse into administration, Reuters reported. Green needs his restructuring proposals for each of Arcadia’s brands - Topshop, Topman, Burton Menswear, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge and Wallis - to be approved by creditors, including landlords, or the group, which employs 18,000, will likely be placed into administration.

Greybull Capital, the private equity firm pilloried over last month’s collapse of British Steel, is preparing a bid for the group’s operations in France and the Netherlands, according to people briefed on the plan. The cherry-picking would see Greybull ditch the British parts of British Steel three years after acquiring the group from India’s Tata Steel for £1 and weeks after it fell into insolvency, the Financial Times reported.

Arcadia Group agreed to provide 210 million pounds ($266.64 million) in security to its pension schemes, which includes an additional 25 million pounds agreed with The Pensions Regulator, the company said in a statement on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The agreed security amount is in addition to the 100 million pound cash support that Christina Green, British retail businessman Philip Green’s wife, agreed to provide to the scheme in May.

The board of North of England telecoms group KCom has pulled its recommendation of a takeover by a pension fund, instead throwing its weight behind a higher bid from a Macquarie investment fund, the Financial Times reported. KCom — which was briefly one of the UK’s highest-valued companies during the dotcom bubble — said on Monday its board planned to unanimously recommend a £563m offer from Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets instead of the £504m offer from the trustees of the Universities Superannuation Scheme, which it backed last month.

Shares in Kier plunged 40 per cent on Monday as it warned that profits would be about £40m lower than expected, adding to fears over the health of the UK outsourcing and construction sector, the Financial Times reported. In an unscheduled trading update, Kier said it expected underlying operating profit for the year to June 30 to be £40m lower than analyst estimates of £169m.

U.K. retail sales declined by the most on record in May, with sluggish growth in online sales and Brexit-related uncertainty taking a toll, Bloomberg News reported. Total sales fell by 2.7%, the biggest drop since at least 1995 when excluding any distortions caused by the timing of Easter. While some of the drop can be accounted for by comparing to last year -- when sales were boosted by sunshine, the World Cup and a royal wedding -- political and economic uncertainty played a significant role, the British Retail Consortium and KPMG said.

British property lending business BondMason told investors it is pulling out of its core peer-to-peer business ahead of an expected downturn in performance, days after another property specialist collapsed in the sector’s largest failure to date, the Financial Times reported. In an email to customers on Wednesday the company said it would stop offering new investments and wind down its service after collecting on its existing loans.

UK shopping centres owned by private equity groups including Lone Star and Oaktree have breached the terms of their loans, after retail failures triggered steep falls in property values, the Financial Times reported. Market players say the breaches will probably trigger a series of asset sales that will crystallise price falls in secondary retail properties.

The past months have been brutal for the U.K.’s retail and consumer industries, and one bank that’s felt its fair share of the pain is HSBC Holdings Plc, which has found itself on the wrong side of several of the highest-profile failures, Bloomberg News reported. Last week, TV celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s casual-dining chain was placed into protection from creditors. That left Europe’s largest bank sitting on about 30 million pounds ($38 million) of potential losses, according to a person familiar with the situation.