Business week in pictures

Harry Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson have splashed out on homes in New York, the UK and the Alps, investing more than a third of their combined wealth in property Photograph: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

Tom Alexander, the chief executive of Orange and T-Mobile, has resigned as boss of Britain's biggest mobile phone company just a year after it was created. Alexander spearheaded the merger of the UK's third and fourth-biggest mobile operators to create the market leader, Everything Everywhere, which operates the mobiles of 28 million Britons Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Danielle Chiesi, the former beauty queen turned stock trader, has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail for her role in the biggest insider-dealing case in decades. Chiesi, 45, was the former confidante of hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon hedge fund Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Andy Hornby, the man at the helm of HBOS when it was bailed out during the financial crisis and who was too stressed to continue as the boss of Alliance Boots in March, has been appointed as the new chief executive of bookmaker Coral Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Banks have failed to tackle the rampant City bonus culture that helped trigger the financial crisis, according to unions and anti-poverty campaigners, who pointed to official figures showing that the sector grabbed bonuses last year worth £14bn Photograph: Jason Hawkes/Getty Images

George Osborne must reverse his VAT hike to restore confidence and boost growth, according to a leading business lobby group. The rise to 20% in January is battering hard-hit industries that have yet to recover from the recession, the Federation of Small Businesses said after its quarterly survey showed a dramatic decline in business confidence in the three months to the end of June Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

Jitters over the eurozone debt crisis and the US debt ceiling drove the gold price through the $1,600 (£995) an ounce mark for the first time on Monday. The price of other precious metals also jumped as investors plumped for safe havens. Silver gained 2% to $40.11 an ounce, its highest since early May, as stock markets fell across Europe Photograph: Jacky Naegelen/Reuters

More than £5bn was wiped off the value of three of Britain's biggest banks on Monday as global financial markets took fright at the deepening crisis in the eurozone. Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays were the biggest fallers on the FTSE 100 Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

French president Nicolas Sarkozy rushed to Berlin and spent seven hours talking to German chancellor Angela Merkel before a crisis summit in Brussels on Thursday. They managed to agree a compromise on the losses that Greece's private creditors are to take in a complex new bailout for Athens Photograph: Hand Out/AFP/Getty Images

The Bank of England's monetary policy committee judged that recent economic weakness had reduced the chance that interest rates would need to rise in the near term, minutes to its July meeting showed. Committee members voted 7-2 to keep rates at 0.5%, as they did in June. Chief economist Spencer Dale and external member Martin Weale voted again to raise rates, while at the other end of the spectrum, Adam Posen repeated his call for more quantitative easing (QE) Photograph: BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images

EDF, the French company at the heart of plans to build a new generation of nuclear plants in Britain, has admitted that a similar plant being constructed in France is going to take almost twice as long and cost nearly twice the anticipated price. The European pressurised reactor (EPR) at Flamanville, in north-western France, is now expected to open in 2016 and cost €6bn (£5.2bn) instead of the original starting date of 2012 and a cost of €3.3bn Photograph: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/Getty Images

President Bill Clinton's former aide and White House press secretary has been named the new boss of Starbucks' UK and Ireland operations. Kris Engskov joined the American coffee chain in 2003 as director of public policy and was most recently regional vice-president of its US Pacific Northwest region Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images