The government has won an argument over insolvency creditor meetings, despite opposition from influential business groups, economia reported. Business groups, including ICAEW and insolvency trade body R3, had told the government to back down on its insolvency reforms – as part of the small business bill – which will see insolvency meetings with creditors banned unless requested by at least 10% of creditors.

“It now looks clear there are minimal prospects for success with our legal challenge, so we will no longer pursue it,” Mr. Osborne said in a letter to Mark Carney, Bank of England governor and chairman of the Financial Stability Board, The Wall Street Journal reported. The decision follows the publication of European legal advice suggesting the U.K.’s challenge would fail. The U.K.

Austerity cuts are an “inescapable reality” in the short term in Northern Ireland but a lower rate of corporation tax could deliver “game changing” private sector growth, the president of a leading business body has said in Belfast tonight, the Irish Times reported. Kevin Kingston, president of the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the next few years would be difficult but without the catalyst of a lower rate of corporation tax the North would face a vicious circle of cuts and austerity.

Bankers’ salaries, not just their bonuses, should be threatened if they break the rules, the Bank of England governor has said. Speaking in the wake of the $4.3bn fines for foreign exchange manipulation, Mark Carney said new pay structures were needed to rebuild trust in the banking system, and reduce risk-taking and short-term thinking, the Financial Times reported. He floated the idea of senior staff taking some of their salary as “performance bonds” citing ideas set forth last month by Bill Dudley, the president of the New York Federal Reserve.

Barclays Plc is considering shifting its businesses into eight entities in response to rules forcing Britain’s largest lenders to separate retail operations from riskier investment-banking units, an internal document shows. The lender is reviewing whether to put its U.K. and European retail operations, its U.S. holding company and a subsidiary carrying out back-office functions within a firewall, separating them from five other entities including a derivatives trading arm, according to the draft document obtained by Bloomberg News. The proposals will go to the board on Dec. 11.

HSBC’s profits fell short of expectations in the third quarter after the bank set aside $1.8 billion for misconduct settlements and compensation for customers, including a potential fine for rigging currency markets, the Irish Times reported. The provision and a jump in HSBC’s everyday compliance costs show the impact of regulators’ increasing efforts to clamp down on bad behaviour in the global banking industry that contributed to the financial crisis.

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.