Barclays has snapped up Lloyds Banking Group’s remaining Irish mortgage portfolio for £4 billion (€4.6 billion) and plans to refinance the loans in the bond market, the Irish Times reported. Sources said that the bank has lined up UK asset manager M&G Investments and US investment giant Pimco to acquire residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) linked to the mortgages. Barclays will also hold onto at least 5 per cent of the notes, in line with securitisation rules brought in following the global financial crisis.

Struggling British mother and baby products retailer Mothercare will close over a third of its UK stores as part of a survival plan that also sees the return of the chief executive who was sacked just five weeks ago, Reuters reported.

Sugru maker FormFormForm is being sold for about £7.6 million, in a deal that will see investors lose up to 90 per cent of their initial investment, the Irish Times reported. The London-based company, which was founded by Irish inventor Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, James Carrigan and Roger Ashby in 2004, will be bought by adhesives specialist Tesa in a deal that will save the firm but values shares at 9 pence each. The German-based firm made a formal offer for FormFormForm in March. The offer has been accepted by 51 per cent of the company’s shareholders.

Bosses of the collapsed construction firm Carillion should face an inquiry into their fitness to serve as directors after they masked the company’s financial ill-health with accounting tricks before its failure, Members of Parliament said on Wednesday. Carillion, which employed 43,000 people to provide services in defence, education, health and transport, collapsed in January, becoming the largest construction bankruptcy in British history, Reuters reported. It left creditors and the firm’s pensioners facing steep losses and put thousands of jobs at risk.

The UK is teaming up with Standard Chartered Bank to lend $100m to Zimbabwean companies in what will be the British government’s first direct commercial loan to the southern African nation’s private sector in more than 20 years, the Financial Times reported. The loan is the biggest sign of a thaw in the UK-Zimbabwe relationship since London imposed sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s regime in the early 2000s. The rapprochement follows Mr Mugabe’s forced resignation in November in a “soft coup” that ended his 37-year rule.

Brokers and investment platforms have admitted they are powerless to prevent customer funds being tapped in the event of an insolvency, after a brokerage collapsed with “huge ramifications” for investors, the Financial Times reported. Some clients of Beaufort Securities, which was closed by Financial Conduct Authority in March, have been told they will have to foot the bill for costly insolvency proceedings being carried out by PwC, the professional services group.

Declining productivity should be “a wake-up call” for the UK, business leaders warned after new data showed it dropped sharply during the first three months of 2018, the Financial Times reported. Output per hour worked fell by 0.5 per cent during the first quarter of 2018 as hours worked rose without a matching increase in economic growth, according to figures published by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday. Other labour market data produced by the ONS pointed to increases in wage growth and employment in the first quarter of the year.

Thomson Reuters is planning to transfer its widely used foreign exchange derivatives trading from London to Dublin to be ready for the UK’s departure from the EU next year, the Irish Times reported. In a media advisory note sent on Tuesday morning Thomson said it had commenced the process of applying to the Central Bank of Ireland for authorisation to operate the business here. The move of the company’s multilateral trading facility comes directly as a result of the UK’s planned departure from the European Union, Thomson Reuters said.

Bosses of the collapsed construction firm Carillion should face an inquiry into their fitness to serve as directors after they masked the company's financial ill-health with accounting tricks before its failure, Members of Parliament said on Wednesday. Carillion, which employed 43,000 people to provide services in defence, education, health and transport, collapsed in January, becoming the largest construction bankruptcy in British history, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Britain's Mothercare, the struggling mother and baby products retailer, said on Monday it would ask investors for more money as part of a major restructuring it plans to announce this week, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The firm has seen sales and profit hammered by intense competition from supermarket groups and online retailers in its main UK market as well as by rising costs. Its shares have lost 86 percent of their value over the last year and in April it replaced Chief Executive Mark Newton-Jones with David Wood, a former Tesco executive.