ABB is to shake up its structure with the aim of saving $1bn a year after activist investor Cevian Capital built up a stake in the power grids and robotics giant, The Telegraph reported. Ahead of an investor day on Tuesday, the world’s largest manufacturer of power grids said it would streamline its organisation, reducing the number of divisions from five to four. The move is expected to produce $1bn of “white collar productivity” savings - job losses among its 100,000 office staff - a year by the end of 2017 and release $2bn in cash from working capital.

Oil company investment in the North Sea is expected to slump by up to £4bn per year through to the end of 2018 as operators slash costs to compensate for lower prices, the industry trade body has warned. In its latest economic report on the North Sea, Oil and Gas UK said that 15pc of the offshore industry’s workforce - equal to 65,000 jobs - has been lost since the beginning of last year as oil companies cut back amid a 50pc slump in prices to around $50 per barrel, the Financial Times reported.

August was the worst month for British retail sales since the global financial crisis of 2008, according to a survey published on Friday. Accountancy firm BDO said its monthly high street sales tracker (HSST) showed a 4.3 percent year-on-year fall in August sales -- the biggest drop since November 2008 and the sixth monthly dip this year.

The new owners of BHS are set to raise £70m as they attempt to rescue the beleaguered department store chain just months after acquiring it, The Telegraph reported. Retail Acquisitions, which bought BHS in March from Sir Philip Green, are in talks with a number of lenders, including hedge funds, to secure new financing to implement future plans. The little-known vehicle, which is led by former stockbroker Keith Smith, confirmed the talks in a statement, saying: “We have said all along that we would refinance to help accelerate the turnaround plan for the UK business.

The Co-operative Bank will not be fined for failings that helped push the bank to the brink of collapse before it was bailed out by bondholders, Britain’s financial regulators said on Tuesday, the Irish Times reported. Instead capital should be preserved to bolster its battered balance sheet, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said. Co-op Bank is trying to recover from its near-collapse in 2013, when it was hit by a yawning hole in its finances, a drugs scandal, an exodus of top executives and losses from bad commercial real estate loans.

Nearly a quarter of Britain's small and medium-sized businesses have been pushed into financial crisis because of late payments, it has emerged, The Telegraph reported. In a new poll of 1,000 business owners, 23pc reported a brush with insolvency due to unpaid invoices. The research, which was commissioned by electronic invoicing network Tungsten, revealed that half of all invoices owed to small firms are overdue. The average small-to-medium-sized enterprise is owed £40,857 in unpaid invoices and £20,937 of that total is overdue.

The Bank of England has signalled that it is unlikely to raise interest rates this year, as the strong pound and further falls in commodity prices keep inflation “muted” in the near term, The Telegraph reported. Sterling fell by more than a cent against the dollar and euro on Thursday as the minutes of its August interest rate meeting showed just one member of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted to raise rates this month. Markets expected more dissent within the nine-member panel.

British regulators said on Thursday that they had barred a former trader at the Dutch lender Rabobank from the securities industry after he pleaded guilty in the United States in March in connection with rigging a global benchmark interest rate, the International New York Times reported. The Financial Conduct Authority of Britain said the former trader, Lee Stewart, 52, had been barred from working in the British financial services industry for lacking “honesty and integrity.” The ban was put in place on July 21, the regulator said. In March, Mr.

Major banks and brokers have failed to make sufficient internal changes following the Libor and foreign exchange rigging scandals, according to the City regulator, The Guardian reported. The Financial Conduct Authority also warned that more action was needed to restore trust in the financial markets after visiting 12 firms and brokers as a follow-up exercise to the fines imposed for rigging Libor, the benchmark exchange rate. The FCA found that none of them had made all the changes required to comply with guidelines for setting prices.

Despite having its budget cut significantly in recent years the Insolvency Service has made orders against 119 rogue directors in the year ending 31 March 2015, compared to 65 the year before, economia reported. The government body has laid off more than a third of its workforce in recent years, going from 3,200 staff to 2,000. Accountancy firm Moore Stephens has called on the new government to back the Insolvency Service as, despite the crackdown, there is still too much criminal director behaviour slipping through the cracks.