Top executives at Royal Bank of Scotland say they will no longer fight the main conclusions and recommendations of a withering independent review of alleged mistreatment of small business customers by the bank, the Financial Times reported. Sir Howard Davies, the chairman, said during a bruising hearing before MPs on Tuesday that RBS “no longer thinks it is useful to have an argument” with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority about the review of the bank’s Global Restructuring Group.

The U.K. Financial Reporting Council opened a probe into KPMG LLP’s audits of Carillion Plc, after the builder collapsed under a mountain of debt earlier this month, Bloomberg News reported. The FRC will examine KPMG’s work from 2014 and whether the auditor breached any "ethical and technical standards," the accounting regulator said in a statement Monday. The FRC will also look at how KPMG recognized revenue on significant contracts and its accounting for pensions. Carillion, a U.K.

British construction outsourcing company Carillion Plc attempted to “wriggle out of its obligations” to pensioners for the last decade, according to Parliament’s Work and Pensions Select Committee. The committee chair, Frank Field, condemned Carillion’s inability to perform its pension obligations while “shelling out dividends and handsome pay packets for those at the top,” Reuters reported.

A London court has sided with Franklin Templeton Investment Management and Russia's Sberbank in a ruling relating to International Bank of Azerbaijan's (IBA) debt restructuring, potentially delaying the process, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Last year, state-owned IBA proposed a plan to restructure $3.3 billion of its debt and said in July it had received approval from creditors holding 93.9 percent of the affected credits.

Ministers are coming under increased pressure to release risk assessments on Carillion made in the months before the contractor’s collapse, the Financial Times reported. The Labour opposition has used an obscure piece of Parliamentary procedure to try to force the government to publish how they perceived the condition of all 30 or so “strategic suppliers” to the state. This “motion for a return” was passed by default on Wednesday night without a vote in the House of Commons.

The UK is one of the only major markets where house prices are unlikely to grow in 2018, according to new forecasts from Fitch Ratings, the Financial Times reported. The ratings agency’s annual housing and mortgage outlook predicted average prices in the UK will be flat this year, with declines in London and the South East due to “Brexit uncertainty, stretched affordabliity and low income growth”. The only housing markets assessed by Fitch with a worse outlook for 2018 were Greece, where it predicted a 2 per cent decline, and Norway, where prices could drop 5 per cent.

Private equity groups and distressed buyout firms are circling collapsed British construction company Carillion to cherry-pick assets from one of the UK’s most politically sensitive corporate failures, the Financial Times reported. The interest from private investors — including the Canadian fund manager Brookfield and British private equity group Endless, which specialises in turnrounds — comes as the government struggles to protect thousands of jobs left at risk by Carillion’s liquidation.

Five UK banks are facing heavy losses on loans to Carillion, after irreconcilable differences between the company, its lenders and the government pushed the UK construction and services group into liquidation on Monday, sources said. Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), HSBC, Santander, Lloyds and Barclays are among the most heavily exposed after providing £140m of emergency loans in September 2017 and are also lenders on a £790m revolving credit facility, Reuters reported.

Royal Bank of Scotland staff helping small firms to restructure debt during the financial crisis were given a list of ways to squeeze more money from struggling clients and told to "Just Hit Budget!", a memo released on Wednesday showed. The release of the 2008 document by the British Parliament's Treasury Select Committee (TSC) comes ahead of a debate by lawmakers on Thursday on the treatment of small business customers by the bank's Global Restructuring Group (GRG), the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Collapsed British firm Carillion, which has come under political fire for paying dividends while racking up big debts and a pension deficit, has handed more than $1 billion to shareholders since it was created 19 years ago, a Reuters analysis shows. The construction company raised its payout to shareholders every year, taking its dividends from 4 pence-a-share in 1999 to 18.45 pence-a-share in 2016, according to the analysis of its accounts, Reuters reported.