The number of UK companies in financial distress has surpassed half a million, underlining the threat of a wave of business collapses from the coronavirus crisis. Distressed companies increased 3 per cent to 506,946 in the first quarter of this year, according to figures from Begbies Traynor, the corporate restructuring business, produced for The Times. Begbies said that they were up 45 per cent since the start of 2014 when it began compiling comparable statistics and that if only 5 per cent of these companies went into insolvency it would mean an additional 25,000 insolvent companies. That compares with a total number of corporate insolvencies last year of 17,196, according to the Office for National Statistics. The pandemic has forced governments to impose extraordinary

Source: The Times March 23, 2020 00:03 UTC