It is anything but the season of good cheer at the London Stock Exchange, which is facing a further major blow to its reputation as a global financial centre with the potential loss of Tui to its rival German bourse in Frankfurt.

Europe's biggest package holiday operator announced this morning that it is considering delisting from the FTSE 250 index in favour of Germany's equivalent MDax. The proposal is set to be put to a vote at Tui's general meeting in February, with any move subject to 75% shareholder approval.

It is the latest in a series of setbacks for the LSE in recent years.

In May of 2022 UK-based plumbing equipment giant Ferguson moved its primary listing from London to the US. It was followed in March of this year by fellow FTSE 100 constituent CRH, the building materials group, which has done the same.

READ MORE: Tui considers London exit as profits more than double

Also in March, UK chip designer ARM bypassed London in favour of floating on the Nasdaq in New York in what was one of the biggest IPOs in recent years.

The list doesn't stop there. Earlier this year gambling giant Flutter completed a secondary listing in New York that many believe to be a precursor to a full relocation. YouGov and Plus500, two staples of the London market, have also publicly considered exiting London.

A host of other London-listed firms have been hit by offers to be taken private as venture capital groups feast on low market valuations.

According to capital markets analytics provider Bain & Co, 16 publicly-listed UK companies were bought by private investors in the first eight months of this year. The total for the whole of 2022 was 14.

The LSE has also been a victim of problems of its own making following a series of technical issues in recent months. On Tuesday it suffered its third outage since October which left the main FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 stocks largely unaffected but saw trading disruptions across approximately 2,200 small cap stocks.

All of this has fuelled fears that London's stock market is losing its lustre, which would have significant knock-on effects on Scotland's financial services sector.