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.

Manolete Partners, which focuses on taking over claims from liquidators of insolvent companies, is the latest litigation funder to weigh up a float on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), the Law Society Gazette reported. Chief executive Steven Cooklin confirmed to the Gazette this morning that the London-based company was ‘looking very seriously’ at listing. It has not revealed any financial details of the proposed float.

Carillion Plc, the failed U.K. outsourcing company, has been criticized by lawmakers investigating its collapse for misclassifying borrowings, Bloomberg News reported. As much as 498 million pounds ($674 million) of Carillion’s liabilities were incorrectly identified as “other creditors,” the U.K. Parliament Work and Pensions Committee said in a statement on Monday, citing estimates from Moody’s. Carillion’s board had discussed the issue in 2015, attributing mounting short-selling of the company’s shares to UBS Group AG broker research highlighting issues with its debt, the committee said.

Customers of collapsed UK brokerage Beaufort Securities have voted in favour of retaining PwC as administrator and accepted its proposals to use up to £100m of private investors’ funds to pay insolvency fees, following a fiery creditors’ meeting on Thursday, the Financial Times reported. PwC confirmed on Friday that clients of the broker, which was shut down by the UK regulator in March, had voted in favour of its proposals, which include a worst-case scenario of spending £100m to return cash and assets valued at £550m to customers.