The steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta is racing to underpin his empire with taxpayer funding by furloughing hundreds of staff at his biggest British plant within 48 hours.
Liberty Steel will furlough workers at its operation in Rotherham and Stocksbridge on Thursday after speeding up initial plans to use the scheme from next week, sources said.
The bid to use the job retention programme comes amid reports that Liberty has missed payments to HMRC for VAT and staff income taxes. GFG Alliance, the owner of Liberty Steel, declined to comment on the tax claims in the Financial Times.
Mr Gupta’s operation is under massive pressure after the collapse of his financial partner Greensill, to which his businesses reportedly owe around £3.6bn.
In his first public remarks since Greensill crashed into administration on Monday, Mr Gupta said that Liberty is facing a “challenging situation” but insisted it has “adequate financing to meet its current requirements”.
Well, if you don’t pay your banker £3.6 billion then you might well have enough money.
This is all very Adam Smith. New ways to finance are easy enough to find. New people worth financing are rare.
It’s come against a background of rising steel prices. It’s likely that working capital needs for GFG are rising at the exact point when they cannot access it. Both raw material and end prices have risen by about 50%.
https://uk.investing.com/commodities/steel-scrap-historical-data https://uk.investing.com/commodities/steel-rebar-historical-data
They have missed payments of VAT and PAYE, expect HMRC to get a winding-up order
Missing tax payments is one thing, but the Vatman is implacable.
Isn’t Gupta the arsehole who used “his” steelworks in the north-east to harvest “carbon credits” – which he promptly sold and shut the works down? Still, I suppose that in “the good old days” there was probably a decent trade in Indulgences as well.
If you owe the bank a million pounds…
– The steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta . . . – start again!
The subsidy fraud boy Sanjeev Gupta . . .
If it’s the same story we’re both thinking of, then stage 2 was opening a new steelworks in the third world funded by EU subsidies.
So, all of his ’empire’ based on funny money then? This again looks like a classic Austrian School mal-investment due to oodles of bad money failure.