Carillion has hired professional services firm EY to assist with a review of its finances, as the UK construction and support services group turns to more outside advisers in a bid to repair its balance sheet, the Financial Times reported. The FTSE 250 group said it had brought in EY “with immediate effect” to work on the strategic review it announced last week, with a focus on cutting costs and collecting more cash from contracts.

In 2014, U.K. builder Carillion Plc was riding high: it had just won a $434 million contract to build the Royal Liverpool Hospital and was attempting to snap up its struggling rival Balfour Beatty Plc for about $2.6 billion, Bloomberg News reported. Three years later, and the former Tarmac business is on life support. Carillion has lost 70 percent of its market value this week after flagging 845 million pounds ($1.09 billion) in surprise contract provisions.

The official who looks after bankrupts’ affairs is seeking to have the bankruptcy period of a Co Westmeath businessman extended over an alleged lack of cooperation and concerns about assets transfers, the Irish Times reported. The business affairs of Patrick J Daly include an investment in a property in Panama in 2006 that was lost through fraud, and which featured in a murder trial in the Central American country in which the fraudsters were convicted of murdering a local politician after he discovered what they were up to.

The availability of consumer credit in the UK economy tightened in the second quarter and is expected to decline further as banks turn cautious amid a worsening in Britain’s economic outlook, according to the Bank of England. Retail banks and other lenders told the BoE they had cut back on the supply of unsecured lending – which includes credit card loans – in the three months to the end of June, the Financial Times reported.

Carillion's lenders are preparing for potentially painful restructuring talks if the British construction company is unable to stabilise its business and plunging share price, sources familiar with the company and its investors said. Carillion, which has worked on projects ranging from London's Tate Modern gallery to the Twickenham Rugby stadium, announced huge provisions on problem contacts on Monday, leading its chief executive to step down and its shares to plummet by more than two thirds in three days, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Carillion Plc interim head Keith Cochrane said “no option is off the table” as the British construction company seeks to recover from a record stock market plunge, weaker-than-expected profit growth and the resignation of its chief executive officer, Bloomberg News reported. Cash flow from some projects has deteriorated, and the board will review all of the company’s major contracts with the help of KPMG, Carillion said in a statement Monday.

Global regulators have claimed victory in the drive to tame the toxic parts of the “shadow banking” market that made a devastating contribution to the global financial crisis a decade ago, the Financial Times reported.

How rich is the irony that a lender should withdraw its support from Fairpoint, the debt management business. Last week, Fairpoint’s bank, AIB, said the UK junior market company needed to find alternative funding, the Financial Times reported. That stopped the group signing off its 2016 accounts and forced it to suspend its shares at 10p, valuing the company at £4.8m or a quarter of borrowings. Fairpoint is the Lancashire company set up in 1997 to help people drowning in debt to deal with their banks.

Consumer credit continued to grow at a double-digit pace in May, underlining why Bank of England officials took action to protect banks against the risk of a debt bubble, Bloomberg News reported. Unsecured lending rose 10.3 percent from a year earlier, the same as in April and close to its fastest rate since 2005, the U.K. central bank said on Thursday. It grew 1.7 billion pounds ($2.2 billion) on the month, the biggest increase since November last year.

The Bank of England published its twice-yearly assessment of UK financial stability on Tuesday. It judges that the UK financial system is more resilient than it was but is concerned that consumer credit is growing too fast and has ordered banks to put more money aside in case the market turns, the Financial Times reported. The bank’s Financial Policy Committee has warned that there are still “pockets of risk that warrant vigilance” in the UK financial system but reduced its overall warning level from “elevated” to “standard”.