Papers

A £3bn property investment company with a host of celebrity investors, including Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir David Frost and Simon Cowell, has collapsed into administration, The Telegraph reports.

The pound remained under pressure this morning amid the latest signs of the worsening economic crisis across the globe which sent Asian markets plummeting following a day of steep losses on Wall Street, The Times reports.

Equitable Life, the troubled mutual life insurer, halted the sale of its £6 billion with-profits fund yesterday after a year of trying to find a buyer for the business, reports The Times.

A series of deadly attacks in India's commercial capital Mumbai forced a closure of the country's stock and commodity exchanges and drove up its risk premium in international credit markets, The Telegraph reports.

The Treasury was last night forced to deny that Alistair Darling was drawing up secret plans to raise VAT to 18.5% in the next parliament in an attempt to fill the black hole in the government's finances created by the recession and the massive stimulus...

Standard Chartered, a leading lender in emerging markets, is seeking to raise £1.78 billion through a rights issue in a bid to bolster its balance sheet as its core markets in Asia, Africa and the Middle East begin to feel the effects of the global downturn,...

Executives at Citigroup, faced with a plunging stock price, began weighing the possibility of auctioning off pieces of the financial giant or even selling the company outright, according to people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reports....

More than one million people will be made redundant in the worst recession for almost twenty years, British business leaders warn, The Telegraph reports.

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), the struggling bank, is preparing to axe up to 3,000 staff across its worldwide workforce as it braces itself against the onslaught of the global recession, The Times reports.

Barclays was trying urgently to renegotiate the terms of its £7bn fund raising on Wednesday night following a bitter shareholder revolt over the terms offered to its Middle Eastern investors, The Telegraph reports.