Company: LLOYDS TSB GROUP PLC

Britain's Barclays said it is to sell all of its $6.1 billion stake in U.S. asset manager BlackRock which it has held for almost three years.

Lloyds Banking Group announced it had set aside a further 375 million pounds ($608 million) to cover mis-sold insurance products as it announced a 288 million pound ($465 million) profit for the first quarter on Tuesday. The figure was down on the previous year’s 316 million pound first quarter profit but was generally in line with the bank’s own expectations.

Financial firms in Britain, including banks hit in 2011 by the euro zone debt crisis, have started taking on new staff again, confounding forecasts for more lay-offs, according to a new industry survey.

HBOS, the troubled British lender taken over by Lloyds Banking Group during the 2008 financial crisis, was guilty of "very serious misconduct" in failing to control risky lending, the financial watchdog said on Friday.

Britain’s two part-nationalized banks plan to tap the European Central Bank’s special three-year funding scheme for a combined amount of about 15 billion euros ($20 billion), on a par with some of the euro zone’s largest banks, the Financial Times reports.

Britain's banking industry, dominated by four big players, may need another investigation by the country's anti-trust regulator due to lack of progress in opening up the sector to competition, Britain's main consumer watchdog said on Thursday.

The chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland has decided to waive a bonus worth almost a million pounds ($1.6 million), the bank said on Sunday, after the handout angered Britons bearing the brunt of government austerity measures.

As bonus season in the City of London gets underway in earnest next week the first of the UK’s major banks, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), announced the bonus package for its chief executive Stephen Hester on Thursday evening and immediately came in for criticism.

HSBC is under investigation by a U.S. Senate panel in a money-laundering inquiry, the latest step in a long-running U.S. effort to halt shadowy money flows through global banks, according to people familiar with the situation and a company securities filing.

David Cameron’s pledge to curb executive pay and stop “rewards for failure” is set to face its biggest test, as Royal Bank of Scotland prepares to offer a bonus of more than £1 million ($1.54 million) to its chief executive, even though the state-controlled bank’s share price has almost halved in a year, the Financial Times reports.

Struggling British lender Lloyds Banking Group is in talks to dispose of its operations in the United Arab Emirates, with Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank emerging as the frontrunner to pick up the business, sources told Reuters on Monday.

Lloyds Banking Group said Antonio Horta-Osorio will return to the position of chief executive on Jan. 9 after independent medical advice said he had made a full recovery after being on sick leave from stress.

A break-up of the single European currency would have severe consequences on the UK economy, with unemployment pushing above 4 million, the pound appreciating sharply and major banks failing, analysts at ING wrote in a market note.

Investors need a strong stomach to invest in UK bank stocks. In recent years they have displayed considerable levels of volatility that cannot be wholly explained by the fundamentals of the individual banks. In fact, bank stocks are now arguably the most effective barometer available to measure risk appetite.