Business week in pictures

Chief executive of Prudential, Tidjane Thiam, leaves after attending the company's annual general meeting in London. Thiam and Harvey McGrath, the chairman, faced down calls from angry shareholders to resign over insurer's botched attempt to take over US insurer AIG's Asian arm. At a stormy annual meeting in London, top management tried to placate investors by apologising several times for the failure and the £450m costs incurred, but insisted at the same time that the $35.5bn deal, which was to have been funded from a record-breaking £14.5bn rights issue, had been the right strategy
Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

BP chief executive Tony Hayward waits to appear on The Andrew Marr Show. An ever-worsening week for Hayward, presiding over efforts to quell the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, began when President Obama said: 'If he was working for me, I'd sack him'
Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/Reuters

A BP contingency plan drawn up to deal with oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico was riddled with errors and miscalculations. An analysis by the Associated Press found that it made false assumptions about the extent, direction and consequences of any possible spill from deep-water drilling off the coast of Louisiana
Photograph: Keystone USA-Zuma/Rex Features

And the company's shares took a pounding on stock markets even as reinforcements arrived in the Gulf of Mexico to help with the clean-up
Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP

On Thursday, prime minister David Cameron waded into the debate and added his voice to the chorus of criticism surrounding BP
Photograph: Lee Celano/Reuters

The strikes called against British Airways by the Unite union came to an end last week: BA's chief executive, Willie Walsh declared strike action by cabin crew 'a failure', citing the number of passengers who had successfully taken flights
Photograph: Luke MacGregor/Reuters

Jérôme Kerviel, the Société Générale employee at the heart of the bank's calamitous trading losses in 2008, went on trial. Lawyers for France's second-biggest bank insist he was a rogue trader who, despite not stealing any of his profits, went to great lengths to hide the extent of his speculation from his bosses. Kerviel's lawyer, however, argues that his client's seniors knew exactly what he was up to: he was simply, says Olivier Metzner, the only one to get caught
Photograph: Thibault Camus/AP

Sir Terry Leahy, the man who turned Tesco into a supermarket juggernaut with sales of £60bn, is stepping down from running the group after a 14-year stint as chief executive. Leahy, who will retire next March, said his work was 'almost complete'. He will be replaced by Philip Clarke, the man who currently leads the international arm of the business
Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

The German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy have called for a total European ban on naked short-selling of government bonds – that is, trades where investors bet a certain stock or bond will fall in value when they don't hold that stock or bond itself. 'Naked short-selling should be prohibited to refrain European markets from suffering a new wave of severe turbulence,' the two presidents said
Photograph: Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images

The outgoing boss of Marks & Spencer, Sir Stuart Rose, scooped a bumper £4.3m in pay and bonuses last year – an increase of nearly 140% on the previous year. Rose, 61, was awarded a bonus of £2.8m in a year when M&S delivered a 5% increase in profits to £632m
Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images