Retailer Toys R Us UK has gone into administration, the firm appointed to oversee the process said, putting around 3,000 jobs at risk, Reuters reported. The toy retailer has struggled in Britain in recent years as shoppers increasingly prefer to spend online rather than visit its large out-of-town stores. Moorfields Advisory said that all stores were to continue trading until further notice, but that the company had entered administration after an “unsuccessful attempt to sell its business as a going concern.” Toys R Us operates more than 100 stores in Britain and also trades as Babies R Us.

Nearly all the senior employees in Royal Bank of Scotland's business turnaround division also worked for its predecessor, which is alleged to have pushed firms into bankruptcy, British lawmakers said on Tuesday. Figures released by RBS showed that the unit, whose predecessor is at the centre of a political storm over its treatment of troubled businesses, had merely been rebranded, Treasury Select Committee Chair Nicky Morgan said.

Theresa May has promised “tough new rules” next month that will aim to stop companies draining away their capital while neglecting their deficit-laden pension schemes. It’s a response to a series of scandals involving companies that have collapsed leaving pension holes behind them, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. The latest of these involves Carillion, which failed last month after a series of writedowns undermined the outsourcing group. At their 2016 valuation, the group’s pension schemes had a deficit of almost £1bn.

The UK’s oldest peer-to-peer service is warning investors that defaults on its recent loans will be running at a higher rate than during the financial crisis, the Financial Times reported. Peer-to-peer investing offers a trade off to investors: if they lend money directly to riskier borrowers, they can get a high rate of return on their cash. But Zopa, the dominant peer-to-peer lender in the UK consumer market with £3bn of lending, is anticipating falling investor returns despite increasing its volume of high-risk loans.

The Pensions Regulator is considering pursuing individuals connected with Carillion as it weighs using its powers to recover cash for the collapsed outsourcing group’s indebted pension schemes, the Financial Times reported. The regulator began an investigation into Carillion on January 18, three days after the group was placed into compulsory liquidation with an estimated £900m funding shortfall in its pension scheme.

British lawmakers on Tuesday published in full a confidential report detailing Royal Bank of Scotland's mistreatment of struggling businesses during and after the financial crisis, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. "The findings in the report are disgraceful," Nicky Morgan, chair of the cross-party Treasury Select Committee, said. The TSC said in a statement it had agreed to publish immediately the final, unredacted report, which contains the findings of an inquiry into RBS's then-restructuring unit GRG.

HSBC has warned that it could pay at least $1.5bn in penalties over alleged tax evasion and money laundering at its Swiss private bank, casting a shadow over Stuart Gulliver’s final day as chief executive, the Financial Times reported. The estimate underlines how the outgoing HSBC boss has struggled to get to grips with the string of scandals thrown up by a number of ill-judged acquisitions dating back to before he took over in 2011. Mr Gulliver was due to hand control of the bank at midnight on Tuesday UK time to John Flint, HSBC’s former global head of retail banking.

Britain’s pensions regulator twice ignored requests from trustees of collapsed outsourcing firm Carillion to force the company to plug its pension deficit, lawmakers said on Tuesday. The Pensions Regulator has come under fire for taking insufficient steps to protect pension scheme members of troubled companies, following the collapse of department store chain BHS in 2016, Reuters reported. Carillion collapsed on Jan. 15, with only 29 million pounds ($41 million) of cash left.

KPMG and other leading accountancy firms face serious questions over their work with failed construction firm Carillion after making millions of pounds out of their relationships with the company, British lawmakers said on Tuesday. Lawmakers from two parliamentary committees examining the collapse of Carillion said that KPMG had earned 29.4 million pounds ($41 million) from auditing the contractor’s accounts since the company was founded in 1999.

A day after the Bank of England hinted that it could raise interest rates faster than many expected, a run of economic figures on Friday suggest the British economy did not end 2017 as strongly as previously thought, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. Official figures showed a 1.3 percent monthly decline in industrial production in December and a 4.9 billion-pound ($6.9 billion) trade deficit for goods and services, its worst since September 2016.