Barclays Plc is entitled to $4 billion in assets stemming from the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapse, as the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from the bankruptcy trustee for the firm’s brokerage business, Bloomberg News reported. The justices left intact a federal appeals court ruling that said Barclays acquired the assets as part of a hastily drafted purchase agreement in September 2008. Barclays bought most of Lehman’s North American brokerage assets in that deal. The trustee, James Giddens, sought to recoup the money, most of which is already in Barclays’ possession.

The Supreme Court has ruled that Olympic Airlines is unable to enter the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) because it did not have an establishment in the UK during its insolvency proceedings, Employee Benefits reported. The case, Trustees of the Olympic Airlines SA Pension and Life Assurance Scheme (Appellants) v Olympic Airlines, relates to the airline’s insolvency in 2009. It entered insolvency in Greece and despite having UK-based operations and a UK defined benefit (DB) pension scheme, it did not have a subsidiary firm in the UK.

Insolvency specialist Begbies Traynor Group warned yesterday that its full year results would be below market expectations thanks to the declining rate of company failures, domain-b.com reported. According to Begbies, the number of UK corporate insolvencies in the first quarter of 2015 were 4,014, a 11.3 per cent decline against the same period last year, and was the lowest level of quarterly appointments since the fourth quarter of 2007.

Royal Bank of Scotland warned it faced a tough 2015 as it plunged to a loss in the first three months of the year, weighed down by £856m of misconduct and litigation charges, The Guardian reported. The 79%-taxpayer-owned bank prepared the way for further penalties for foreign exchange rigging – including possible criminal charges – by setting aside a further £334m for manipulation of the £3.5tn-a-day global currency markets.

Carcraft, once described as the UK's leading car supermarket, has gone into administration today, resulting in the loss of around 550 jobs, The Telegraph reported. The announcement was made to shocked staff at the Rochdale head office at 10.30am today. Grant Thornton, the financial services company, has been appointed as administrator. Carcraft will now cease trading and all employees have been made redundant. According to a statement made by Grant Thornton today, Carcraft is "heavily loss-making", recording losses of £8m per annum "for a number of years".

A “stark” divide between the north and south of England has opened up since the recession in rates of personal insolvency, highlighting the uneven nature of the economic recovery, the Financial Times reported. In London and the home counties, insolvency rates fell 18 per cent and 16 per cent respectively in the five years from 2008 as the services industries staged a concerted recovery, according to research by the accountancy firm Moore Stephens. But in the northeast and northwest of England, personal insolvency rates rose by 5 and 4 per cent respectively.

The slump in oil prices looks set to claim its highest-profile victim after a North Sea drilling firm warned it was facing collapse unless it can bring in urgent funding, The Scotsman reported. Trap Oil, which is quoted on London’s Alternative Investment Market, said yesterday it was “highly likely” to run out of cash within three months as a result of “depressed” Brent crude prices, which have tumbled by about half since last summer. The company’s only producing asset is the Athena oil field, in which it has a 15 per cent stake.

Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco posted the worst annual loss in its 96-year history on Wednesday after writing down the value of its stores by £4.7 billion, the Irish Times reported. Also hurt by an accounting scandal and sliding sales due to pressure from discounters and a brutal price war the supermarket made a statutory pre-tax loss of £6.38 billion (€8.9bn) in the year to February 28th. The grocer, which was recently overtaken by Supervalu as the largest supermarket in Ireland, announced a 6.3 per cent fall in sales here over this period, with full-year sales falling to €2.6bn.

Scotland would need to make “substantial” tax rises or spending cuts if it won full control over taxation and spending, a respected think-tank has warned, undermining claims by the Scottish National party it would be able to bring austerity to an end, the Financial Times reported. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that a Scottish government could face a hole of up to £10bn if it were given responsibility to balance its books over the course of the next parliament. This is equivalent to nearly 5 per cent of Scottish gross domestic product.

Britain is not usually considered the wild frontier of the oil industry, but it is proving to be a tough environment for what had been a fast-growing engineering and construction company called Petrofac, the International New York Times reported. The company on Monday said that it was likely to incur a deeper loss on an $800 million natural gas plant that it has been building for the French oil giant Total on the Shetland Islands north of Scotland. The company’s stock price dropped about 10 percent in trading on Monday.