United Kingdom

No company has the ability to pay unlimited claims, even one that earned $16.6 billion last year and more than $20 billion annually in the prior four years. At the same time, no one has any idea how big BP’s damages will be, Bloomberg reported in a commentary. That hasn’t stopped Wall Street analysts from churning out estimates that move up in lockstep with the number of barrels thought to be leaking from the collapsed well each day. How many companies are willing to face unlimited civil claims, the prospect of criminal prosecution and daily excoriation by the U.S.

Banks in the UK will be forced to pay more than £2bn in a new annual levy, George Osborne, the chancellor, announced on Tuesday, in what was expected to be the first of a series of taxes on large financial institutions in several developed economies, the Financial Times reported. The tax, to be paid from January, will be imposed on UK banks and building societies as well as the UK operations of foreign banks. Mr Osborne stressed that France and Germany had also pledged to introduce a similar bank levy, although full details have not yet been provided.

Barclays Plc's President Robert Diamond said on Monday that the British bank's comments to the media about its deal to acquire parts of Lehman Brothers may not have been official disclosure to the U.S. bankruptcy court, which approved the takeover, Reuters reported. At issue is whether the British bank received an unfair $11 billion windfall when it acquired parts of Lehman Brothers after the investment bank's collapse in Sept., 2008. Diamond said that Barclays had tried to craft a deal to take over Lehman's core U.S. brokerage business in a way that Barclays would see a gain.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne readied a sweeping emergency budget on Tuesday that is likely to combine severe spending cuts and tax increases in Britain’s deepest fiscal retrenchment since the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s rule, The New York Times reported. Mr. Osborne’s address was anxiously awaited by a nation that, in the wake of the debt crises in other European countries such as Greece, Ireland and Spain, has been steeling itself for cuts in public services but has by no means accepted that it must make sacrifices.

Spanish banking giant Santander today confirmed its bid for more than 300 branches that are being sold off by part-nationalised Royal Bank of Scotland in Britain, Finfacts reported. The owner of Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley is the sole bidder for the 318 branches which NatWest owner RBS is disposing on the instructions of the European Commission. The business being sold has about three million customers - - - two-thirds of which are small businesses - - and consists of RBS branches in England and Wales as well as its NatWest uniits in Scotland.

BP has tapped financial advisers at Goldman Sachs, Blackstone Group and Credit Suisse as pressure mounts on the British energy giant over the devastating Gulf of Mexico oil spill, US media reported Monday. A BP spokesman denied the reports, saying the group did not want to reveal "who are our advisors and on what they are advising us," Agence France-Presse reported.

BP dismissed talk that it might seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the face of falling stock prices and threats from government officials to force the oil giant to pay more in costs related to the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Japan's Nomura Holdings Inc. is objecting to Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s attempt to consolidate legal action against Nomura's affiliates in three countries as the two investment banks battle over more than $1 billion of claims related to derivatives contracts, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. In papers filed Wednesday with the U.S.

More than 40 U.S. lawmakers called today for BP Plc to suspend its dividend, stop its advertising and spend the money instead cleaning up its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. “Not a single cent” should be spent on television ads, said Representative Lois Capps, a California Democrat, at a news conference in Washington.

Begbies Traynor, the corporate insolvency specialist, continues to expect UK companies going bust because of the recession, the Financial Times reported. “There are lots of zombie businesses, which are effectively the walking dead and have no chance of actually coming back to life,” said Ric Traynor, executive chairman. Most of the pain from the recession had yet to be felt, he added. Mr Traynor said he had yet to see any rise in the number of corporate insolvencies this year.