Britain's banks will be forced to maintain significant financial safety nets under rules announced on Friday that industry leaders say could raise the cost of mortgages and penalise building societies, The Telegraph reported. The Bank of England is expected to go beyond global standards in revealing the leverage ratio – the level of financial reserves banks must hold to protect against a downturn – it expects banks to adopt.

The rate of companies being liquidated has fallen to its lowest level since records started in 1984, Insolvency Service figures show, The Guardian reported. In the 12 months to September, one in 186 active companies, or 0.54%, went into liquidation in England and Wales, in a continuation of a downward trend since 2011. Experts welcomed the business insolvency figures as another sign that the economy is “firmly in recovery mode” but they also warned that firms will face growing pains as economic improvement continues and interest rates start to climb.

Tesco’s profits for the first six months of 2014 have been nearly wiped out by the toxic combination of the recent accounting scandal and slumping sales at its declining UK store empire, The Guardian reported. In another dark day for the supermarket giant, the accounting fiasco claimed the scalp of chairman Sir Richard Broadbent and the company said it was withholding million-pound payoffs to its former chief executive Philip Clarke and finance director Laurie McIlwee until an investigation into its mis-stated accounts by the City watchdog was complete.

HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA) Chairman Douglas Flint said separating his bank’s securities arm from its consumer unit may cost as much as 2 billion pounds ($3.2 billion), Bloomberg News reported. “Ringfencing will cost one billion, two billion to implement, which is a structural separation that is going to be very expensive,” Flint told the House of Lords’s European Union Economic and Financial Affairs Subcommittee in London today. British lenders must build firewalls between their consumer and investment banks by 2019 to meet rules proposed by John Vickers’s Independent Commission on Banking.

Borrowers are not ready for higher interest rates and could struggle to pay the bills even with a small rise in repayments, RBS chief Ross McEwan warned yesterday. Most RBS and NatWest mortgage borrowers had never experienced an interest rate rise, he said, and nationally more than 1.5m borr­owers bought their house after 2007 when rates last went up. He is setting up a task force headed by RBS senior economist Sebastian Burnside to study the impact of a rate rise, and come up with a plan to prepare borrowers.

Slaughter and May, Clifford Chance (CC) and Hogan Lovells have won advisory roles on pubs giant Punch Taverns’ £2.3bn debt refinancing, LegalWeek reported. Punch, which began talks on its restructuring nearly two years ago, received the approval needed for its restructuring proposals from the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds Bank last week. The deal, which has reduced net debt by £600m to £1.5bn, included a debt-for-equity swap that has given bondholders 85% of the company’s equity.

Two independent directors on the board that oversees HSBC’s British business may leave the bank over stricter rules aimed at holding bankers more accountable for reckless actions that may lead to the failure of a lender, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. Alan Thomson, a member of the audit and risk committees at HSBC Bank, has tendered his resignation and will leave the bank later this month, said the person, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

R3 has called for reforms to legal funding for insolvency cases, returning money from rogue directors to creditors, the treatment of small business creditors in football insolvencies, the government's approach to being a creditor in insolvencies and a comprehensive update of the personal insolvency regime, Accountancy Age reported. Every year, £160m is returned to creditors (mainly small businesses and HMRC) as a result of legal action against directors of insolvent companies who have wrongly, negligently, or fraudulently taken creditors' money.

A former senior banker at a leading British bank became the first person in Britain to plead guilty to a criminal charge in a continuing inquiry into the manipulation of a global benchmark interest rate, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. The former banker pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to defraud in connection with manipulating the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

UK short-term lender Wonga is writing off the debt of around 330,000 customers worth about 220 million pounds ($356 million), after being forced to overhaul its lending practices by Britain's financial regulator, Reuters reported. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said on Thursday Wonga had entered into a so-called voluntary requirement agreement to make the changes, which ensures immediate redress for consumers while allowing the regulator to continue investigations and possible enforcement action.