LONDON (ShareCast) - Bradford & Bingley’s largest shareholders were forced to rescue the bank's capital-raising effort last night as TPG Capital, the private equity group, pulled out of a £179m deal writes the Times.

TPG had agreed to take a 23% stake in the lender but, after learning of an expected downgrade of B&B’s rating by the ratings agency Moody’s, the fund’s managers are thought to have walked away.

However, the bank is believed to have set in motion a contingency plan that it had discussed with the Financial Services Authority, under which some of B&B’s is to come from shareholders in a £179m rights issue.

British Airways flights are taking off with almost a quarter of their seats empty after higher air fares and a slowing economy led to 87,000 fewer passengers using the British flag-carrier last month. The airline said it carried 2.9 per cent fewer passengers than the same month last year with traffic to Africa, the Middle East and the United States being the weakest. The load factor on BA's aircraft, a measure of how full each plane is when it flies, fell 3.8 percentage points to 76.7%, reports the Times.

Barratt Developments has joined the growing list of housebuilders cutting employee numbers as it struggles to cope with the effects of the credit crisis.
The troubled housebuilder told staff yesterday that it was to cut 1,000 positions from its 6,700-strong workforce.The company has struggled in recent months, weighed down by £1.8bn of debt and a rapidly falling order book for new homes, reports the Telegraph.

Property tycoon Robert Tchenguiz yesterday moved against short-sellers in pub group Mitchells & Butlers, converting a derivatives holding of almost 26 per cent into shares in order to stop it being lent to those betting on price falls. Tchenguiz has ordered his broker not to lend out stock,reports the FT.

More than four million households have resorted to personal loans or credit cards to cover mortgage or rent payments in the past year. The financial comparison site Moneysupermarket.com said that many more homeowners could be sucked into a spiral of servicing long-term debt with expensive short-term borrowing when about £30 billion of mortgage deals come to an end this month.T

General Motors, the maker of the iconic off-road Hummer, may be gearing itself up to sell mini-cars in the US, in order to win back market share as soaring fuel costs turn Americans off gas-guzzlers. Usually sold only in Asia and Latin America, GM is thought to be developing a version of the Chevrolet Beat for America’s highways, writes the Telegraph.

HBOS has started a strategic review of Grant Bovey's struggling buy-to-let business Imagine Homes. According to a report in Property Week published today, Mr Bovey, who is as famous for his marriage to TV presenter Anthea Turner as for his business career, is in talks with HBOS - which owns 20pc of Imagine and is also its lender - about a restructuring that could see the company split up.Tel

The investment vehicle of Aziz Tayub, the food wholesale entrepreneur, is set to take control of Instore, the discount retailer that owns Poundstretcher, in which it has a 30 per cent stake. Instore rebuffed a £11.4m bid approach that valued the company at 17 per cent less than the previous day's closing price. However, the bidder said Tradegro, the South African investment group controlled by Instore's chairman, would accept the 5p a share offer for a 20.4 per cent holding.FT

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