Steel baron Sanjeev Gupta, who had plans to set up a financial services empire from banking to insurance, has turned to a bank he owns in Romania to process transactions as criminal probes focus on his metals empire after the collapse of Greensill Capital, his main lender. Gupta, whose British bank Wyelands said last week it had “no viable future” and faces potentially crippling fines from regulators, owns Banca Romana de Credite si Investitii (BRCI) in Bucharest.
BRCI has processed a number of payments for businesses in Gupta’s GFG Alliance in the past year,
according to people familiar with the transactions and documents. The documents show
that Gupta’s business last year used a bank account at BRCI for a carbon credits transaction struck the month after Greensill’s collapse sparked a liquidity crisis at GFG.
While Gupta is known for borrowing billions from Greensill to buy up steelworks, he also sought to
establish a financial services empire from banking to insurance. Wyelands gathered £700mn from savers at its peak but had to return deposits last year amid rising concerns over its financial position. The steel baron took over Romania’s BRCI in February 2020, days after it was revealed that Wyelands had channeled money into Gupta’s wider empire through entities his employees often referred to as “Friends of Sanjeev”.
BRCI said it “provides limited factoring to a very small number of Liberty Galati’s Romanian customers”. The bank was “well-capitalised” and the majority of its €65mn in assets consisted of “high-quality, liquid assets”. GFG has said that, BRCI provides no financing to any GFG Alliance company and has no outstanding loans or credit arrangements with any GFG Alliance company.
