Deutsche Annington Immobilien AG, Germany's leading residential property owner, on Tuesday, July 10, unveiled a preliminary agreement to restructure €4.3 billion ($5.27 billion) of debt in a deal that could lead to a public listing in 2013 or 2014, The Deal Pipeline reported. If the deal goes ahead, British buyout firm Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd., which owns the German business through a dedicated fund, will start the ball rolling with an injection of €504 million, roughly half in cash. Terra Firma will deliver the other half by forgiving a shareholder loan.

Royal Bank of Scotland and two other banks have abandoned talks on restructuring Dubai Group’s $10bn debt and threatened to bring unprecedented legal action against the investment vehicle of Dubai’s ruler, sources close to the matter said, Gulf Times reported on a Reuters story. The walkout by RBS, German lender Commerzbank and South Africa’s Standard Bank at the beginning of June could prevent a deal for the entire restructuring just as an initial agreement is about to be circulated to other banks, five sources said.

Tighter credit conditions and a weak economy weighed on the U.K. housing market in June as house prices fell and activity slowed, a survey by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors showed Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Separately, a survey from the British Retail Consortium U.K. retail sales for the first half of 2012 were subdued as the wettest June on record curbed spending, despite shoppers having an extra day off to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's Jubilee. House prices retreated further in June amid a weak economy and the euro-zone debt crisis.

Britain's banks are "throttling" the economic recovery because of an anti-business culture which focuses on short-term profits, the business secretary, Vince Cable, has said. As Ed Balls warned of widespread outrage if the ousted Barclays chief executive, Bob Diamond, receives a £16m pay-off, Cable accused banks of undermining multibillion-pound measures to help businesses, The Guardian reported.

British lawmakers backed a government plan on Thursday to hold a parliamentary inquiry into the professional and cultural standards of bankers brought into focus by the Barclays rate-rigging scandal that has deeply divided politicians, Reuters reported. They rejected a call by the opposition Labour party for an independent judge-led investigation, along the lines of an existing wide-ranging inquiry into British media standards. Legislators voted 330 to 226 in favor of the parliamentary inquiry, announced by the government on July 2.

When Petroplus went bankrupt early this year, many in the industry thought that at least the Coryton oil refinery in England, the most modern and efficient of its five plants in western Europe, would survive. So far it is the only one to have closed, doomed by the priorities of UK bankruptcy law, the British government's laissez faire approach and strategic calculations by trading houses who saw more opportunities from other refinery assets, Reuters reported.

The figurehead of the UK's insolvency industry has warned that a new batch of retailers could be forced into administration as the high street attempts to trade through one of the most financially stressful weeks of the year, The Guardian reported. The forecast by Lee Manning, the president of the insolvency industry's trade body, R3, comes as shopkeepers attempt to pay their landlords three months' advance rent on their stores, a bill that became due on Sunday in a deadline known as "rent quarter day".

The Bank of England signalled on Wednesday that it was close to releasing a wave of new money into the shrinking British economy because of the worsening euro zone debt crisis. Such a move would effectively involve printing money to buy government bonds, in turn lowering British borrowing costs. Coming on the back of last week's announcement of new BoE and government measures to spur lending to businesses, it underlines the depth of concern that exists about the state of Britain's economy as its main trading partners weaken.

Britain's beleaguered homeowners will have to wait until 2014 at least before they see a rise in the value of their properties, as weak demand and tight lending conditions keep the market in check, a Reuters poll found on Tuesday. Home prices, which have dropped about a fifth since their peak five years ago, will fall another 1.6 percent this year and only hold steady in 2013, according to the poll of more than 20 market watchers taken in the past few days. Housing has long been a bedrock of consumer wealth in Britain and average prices tripled during a property boom in the 10 years to 2007.

The U.K. on Thursday unveiled an extraordinary series of measures designed to insulate the British financial system and economy from the euro zone's deepening crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and Bank of England Gov. Mervyn King announced plans to flood banks with cheap funds in a dual attempt to jump-start lending to British households and businesses and to fend off potential financial problems at big U.K. lenders. The programs resemble some of the emergency measures enacted by central banks in Europe and the U.S.