Panic has hit the British market over the uncertainty around the upcoming Scottish referendum with investors pulling out $27 billion out of UK financial assets in August — the biggest capital outflow since the Lehman crisis in 2008, The Times of India reported. The London-based consultancy CrossBorder Capital has confirmed the biggest drain of financial assets since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. On Thursday, Scotland will vote in the historic referendum to decide whether it would continue to be part of the United Kingdom or become an independent country.

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney can’t get away from the housing market, Bloomberg News reported. As he argues there is no immediate need to raise interest rates, central to his case is the mountain of debt financing property. Home loans account for almost 90 percent of the 1.45 trillion pounds ($2.3 trillion) owed by U.K. households. In London, where the average home costs 500,000 pounds, first-time buyers are paying almost nine times their annual income to get onto the housing ladder.

Scotland's two biggest banks are joining a growing chorus of businesses warning about the impact of the breakup of the U.K.'s more than 300 year-old union, The Wall Street Journal reported. Lloyds Banking Group PLC said Wednesday it would move the bank's legal headquarters to London from Edinburgh in the event of a "Yes" vote for Scottish independence on Sept. 18. Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC will make a similar announcement Thursday morning, according to a person close to the bank.

If investors felt the first flutters of nerves last week over Scotland’s independence referendum, they are now on high alert, the Financial Times reported. The publication of the first poll to put the pro-independence campaign in the lead prompted a sharp fall in the pound on Monday and a sell-off in the shares of companies with Scottish exposure. It also led to a marked shift in investors’ expectations for the timing of the first rise in UK interest rates.

London’s property market stagnated for a second month in August as buyers became reluctant to accept high asking prices amid the prospect of increasing borrowing costs, Hometrack Ltd. said, Bloomberg News reported. The survey of real-estate agents showed values were unchanged in the capital in a “stark” change from the sharp increases over the past year that helped propel national prices to a record. Across England and Wales, values grew 0.1 percent in August, the same as in July, bolstered by gains in commuter towns in the southeast.

Almost 1,000 complaints were made against insolvency practitioners in the last 12 months, representing an increase of 25% on the previous year, according to figures from the Insolvency Service, Accountancy Age reported. The Insolvency Service revealed a steep rise in complaints about practitioners since it launched its Insolvency Practitioners' Complaints Gateway in June 2013 as a single point of entry for complaints about insolvency practitioners.

London home sellers cut asking prices by the most in more than six years this month, adding to signs that the property market in the UK capital is coming off the boil, the Irish Times reported. London values fell 5.9 per cent from the previous month to an average £552,783 (€688,269), the biggest drop since December 2007, property website Rightmove said today. Nationally, prices declined 2.9 per cent, a record for an August. While property demand usually weakens during the summer, Rightmove said the slump this year was steeper than it expected.

The revival of subprime lending has gathered pace after Provident Financial bought a car finance group that provides loans to customers who would be shunned from traditional lenders, the Financial Times reported. It follows a period of rapid growth for Provident, a doorstep lender that has benefited from rising profitability by offering loans and credit cards to riskier and credit-impaired borrowers. Provident said it had bought Moneybarn, the subprime car finance company, for £120m. It is its first acquisition since the financial crisis.

Britain’s Serious Fraud Office said on Thursday that it had reached a second settlement in a series of civil claims brought by two brothers after a flawed investigation into the collapse of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing during the financial crisis, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported.

Zodiac Pool Solutions SAS, the Paris-based swimming pool and spa manufacturer, filed Thursday for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. as part of its debt-restructuring effort now under way in the U.K., The Wall Street Journal reported. Formerly known as Zodiac Marine & Pool, Zodiac Pool filed for protection under Chapter 15—the section of the Bankruptcy Code that deals with international insolvencies—in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del.