British Indian Steel billionaire is apparently into troublesome waters after it has emerged that Liberty Steel has reportedly missed deadlines to file accounts for some of its biggest British businesses.
Sanjeev Gupta is listed as the director of 15 companies whose accounts are overdue at Companies House, including those that operate the Liberty Steel works in Rotherham and Stocksbridge in South Yorkshire. Other facilities with overdue accounts include those in Newport and Tredegar in south Wales, Dalzell in Scotland and Coventry in the West Midlands, plus Gupta’s Scottish aluminium smelter. Additionally, according to The Guardian, Sanjeev Gupta is also listed as a director of 79 UK firms.
Previously it had been reported that Sanjeev Gupta was urgently seeking finance for companies under the umbrella banner of GFG Alliance, including Liberty Steel, an aluminium company and an energy company. The alliance has about 35,000 employees worldwide, of whom 3,500 are in the UK. But if media reports were to be believed then the government had reportedly refused to bail him out amidst the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Sanjeev Gupta has funded takeovers of the various metals assets in the UK, Australia and elsewhere in part through loans advanced by Greensill Capital, a lender founded by the Australian banker Lex Greensill. Greensill collapsed last month after having lent Gupta’s companies as much as £3.6bn. The UK government ordered an independent inquiry into the former prime minister David Cameron’s role in lobbying for Greensill to access government-backed coronavirus loan schemes.
Earlier in an emotional appeal to save his troubled steel giant from insolvency, the industrialist called for “cool heads and collaboration” with banks seeking to wind up Liberty Commodities, one of the central pillars of his metals empire.
Writing for The Times Red Box, Gupta acknowledged that Liberty’s parent company, GFG Alliance, needs to “over haul” its financing arrangements after the collapse of Greensill Capital, its main lender.
Despite his empire being in billions of pounds in debt, Gupta said, “Most of our businesses are now sustainable.”
