Vince Cable has issued a stark warning to Britain's leading boardrooms that they need to crack down on bonuses to restore public trust and avert the threat of fresh legislation to limit executive pay, The Guardian reported. The business secretary fired off a warning to the 100 biggest UK-listed companies about the damage big pay deals can have on their image, before Barclays' annual meeting on Thursday, where protests about the bank's £2.4bn bonus pot are expected to be registered by disgruntled shareholders.

Creditors – including HM Revenue & Customs – could lose more than £150m a year if the government applies the Jackson reforms to insolvency cases, a new report claims. Research commissioned by R3, a trade body for insolvency professionals, found litigation currently brings in £300m a year from insolvent businesses. Of this, up to £70m relates to money owed to HMRC, with the rest owed to businesses, The Law Society Gazette reported.

Royal Bank of Scotland has been cleared of deliberately engineering the collapse of some of its business customers, but has decided to sell off the £3.2bn commercial property portfolio at the centre of the row, The Guardian reported. The state-backed lender was accused last November in a report by a former government adviser, Lawrence Tomlinson, of putting some distressed commercial clients out of business in order to scoop up assets for its own West Register property business.

Britain's Co-operative Group will report a loss of more than 2 billion pounds on Thursday, laying bare the full damage done by disastrous acquisitions, a drugs scandal and an exodus of executives that have put its future as a mutual into doubt, Reuters reported. Losses at the group, whose activities range from supermarkets to funeral services, are expected to be up to 2.5 billion pounds for 2013, according to a source close to the matter.

British pawnbroker Albemarle & Bond will be bought out of administration by investment fund Promethean Investments in a deal which will save the majority of its stores and 628 jobs, administrators said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The acquisition comes a day after Britain's biggest pawnbroker H&T said it was ending talks regarding the possible acquisition of some of A&B's assets. Administrator PwC said in a statement that the deal with Promethean involved it taking on 128 A&B stores out of 187, and 628 staff out of a workforce of 809.

The Co-operative Group will highlight the urgency of sweeping governance reforms this week as it reveals the extent of its financial woes with a record £2bn-£2.5bn pre-tax loss, the Financial Times reported. The loss, set to be announced on Thursday, will cap a torrid 12 months for the mutual, saddled with high debt and facing a weakened management team after two senior directors quit. It includes a £1.3bn shortfall at the Co-op Bank, which the group owned in its entirety until a recapitalisation in December reduced its stake to 30 per cent.

Punch Taverns, Britain’s second biggest pubs group, has brought in an independent corporate restructuring expert to aid long-running discussions over its £2.3bn debt mountain, The Telegraph reported. Dean Merritt, from Talbot Hughes McKillop, is representing the companies that issued Punch’s debt, amid hopes a deal that is agreeable to all lenders and shareholders can be thrashed out by the beginning of next month.

The Bank of England will have to rethink how it acts as lender of last resort after Britain failed to revise incoming EU rules that could scupper its scheme to give covert support to banks in difficulty, the Financial Times reported. Three EU countries rebuffed Britain’s last-minute pleas to “clarify” the fine print of an agreed rule book on bank crises so that central banks are allowed secretly to prop up lenders facing short-term funding difficulties.

Get ready for the biggest vote in the Co-op's 170-year history. Amid the squabbles, resignations and rows over pay, the poll on 17 May on boardroom reform will take place with the organisation's finances looking ghastly, The Guardian reported in a commentary. This is where attention will soon be concentrated once the Co-op Group publishes its accounts for 2013. It is also why the group's lenders, who have remained silent so far, could yet influence the struggle for power. Group debts were £1.2bn at the half-year stage.

An independent Scotland would face an immediate debt repayment of 23 billion pounds to the UK Treasury, British media reported, citing a leading economics research body's estimate. According to newspapers including The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Times, The National Institute for Economics and Social Research (NIESR) has warned that Scotland would have to borrow 23 billion pounds in its first year of independence, at interest rates of up to 1.65 percent higher than the UK Treasury's rates.