The slump in oil prices looks set to claim its highest-profile victim after a North Sea drilling firm warned it was facing collapse unless it can bring in urgent funding, The Scotsman reported. Trap Oil, which is quoted on London’s Alternative Investment Market, said yesterday it was “highly likely” to run out of cash within three months as a result of “depressed” Brent crude prices, which have tumbled by about half since last summer. The company’s only producing asset is the Athena oil field, in which it has a 15 per cent stake.

Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco posted the worst annual loss in its 96-year history on Wednesday after writing down the value of its stores by £4.7 billion, the Irish Times reported. Also hurt by an accounting scandal and sliding sales due to pressure from discounters and a brutal price war the supermarket made a statutory pre-tax loss of £6.38 billion (€8.9bn) in the year to February 28th. The grocer, which was recently overtaken by Supervalu as the largest supermarket in Ireland, announced a 6.3 per cent fall in sales here over this period, with full-year sales falling to €2.6bn.

Scotland would need to make “substantial” tax rises or spending cuts if it won full control over taxation and spending, a respected think-tank has warned, undermining claims by the Scottish National party it would be able to bring austerity to an end, the Financial Times reported. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that a Scottish government could face a hole of up to £10bn if it were given responsibility to balance its books over the course of the next parliament. This is equivalent to nearly 5 per cent of Scottish gross domestic product.

Britain is not usually considered the wild frontier of the oil industry, but it is proving to be a tough environment for what had been a fast-growing engineering and construction company called Petrofac, the International New York Times reported. The company on Monday said that it was likely to incur a deeper loss on an $800 million natural gas plant that it has been building for the French oil giant Total on the Shetland Islands north of Scotland. The company’s stock price dropped about 10 percent in trading on Monday.

Unsecured creditors, including HMRC, of collapsed mobile retailer Phones4U will see a return of just 0.4%, PwC said in its latest progress report yesterday, Economia reported. PwC, which was appointed administrator of the mobile retailer after it collapsed in September last year, said secured creditors, who own £430m of senior secured notes which were listed on the Irish Stock Exchange, will receive 20% to 24% of their money, as their debt ranks higher in legal terms.

The British bank HSBC said on Thursday that it had been placed under formal criminal investigation by French magistrates examining whether its Swiss private bank assisted wealthy clients to avoid taxes, the International New York Times reported. Investigating magistrates in France have been conducting an inquiry into whether HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) helped individuals avoid their tax-reporting requirements from 2006 to 2007. In November, the Swiss private banking unit was separately placed under formal investigation.

Ireland could offer itself as a home to some of Britain’s wealthiest residents if a Labour government was elected in the UK and followed through on threats to abolish a rule which allows some people to mitigate their UK tax liability, the Irish Times reported. Labour leader Ed Miliband has declared that, if elected in the forthcoming election, he would end the regime which allows those who are resident, but not domiciled in the UK, to avoid paying tax on their worldwide income.

The UK’s five largest banks cut bonus pools by more than £1 billion last year and most also reduced pay and staff numbers, according to Financial Times analysis, potentially blunting political attacks on banker excess ahead of the general election. The sweeping changes to remuneration are revealed in figures based on the annual financial statements of Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland and Standard Chartered.

Britain’s seven biggest lenders will be assessed on whether they could withstand a severe external shock including a Chinese property crash, a deep eurozone recession and the worst deflation since the 1930s, the Financial Times reported. The Bank of England on Monday presented the scenario for its second annual stress tests, which it said expanded on last year’s exercise to include more of a focus on global risks.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has decided to cease regulating solicitors who act as insolvency practitioners despite opposition from the profession, Accountancy Age reported. A consultation was held on SRA regulation of solicitor insolvency practitioners in November last year in which IPs were opposed to the plans. There are currently 129 solicitors operating as insolvency practitioners.