Existing and former Halliwells partners may find themselves jointly liable for around £10m owed to the national firm's banks as it moves to thrash out a deal to transfer the business, Legal Week reported. Halliwells' banks collectively lent partners around £10m to fund capital contributions, which the law firm confirmed it is unable to pay back. Usually a law firm undertakes to pay the loan - which is taken out by partners and put into the firm on entering the equity - back to the bank on the partner's departure.

British accounting firm Vantis called in administrators FTI Consulting on Tuesday after attempts to reduce its debt levels failed, Reuters reported. Earlier in June, the company raised doubts about its ability to continue as a going concern due to lack of funds and its shares were temporarily suspended. It had previously said it was in talks with banks regarding a potential restructuring of its balance sheet to reduce debt. Vantis has been hit by the impact of the recession on its business advisory and tax division and a weaker-than-expected performance of its business recovery unit.

U.K law may prevent the Financial Services Authority from releasing detailed information on banks’ stress-tests without the lenders’ consent, Bloomberg reported. The U.K. banking supervisor can’t disclose confidential information “without the consent of the person from whom” the regulator obtained the information, according to the Financial Services and Markets Act, which was enacted 10 years ago. EU leaders agreed this month to disclose how banks perform in European stress tests, seeking to show investors that the financial system can withstand shocks.

Halliwells has moved to appoint an administrator as the firm looks to secure a takeover by Hill Dickinson to transfer the bulk of its business and assets, Legal Week reported. Halliwells this week filed for court approval to appoint an administrator. This process triggered a moratorium on Halliwells' liabilities and is expected to provide a window to negotiate the future of the business, which the firm asserts is fundamentally strong on an operating basis. The expectation is that Halliwells will ultimately be dissolved after the transfer of assets.

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.