Liberty House, the company that could save the British steel industry from collapse, began in a Cambridge student’s dormitory room. Its founder, Sanjeev Gupta, was thrown out of residential halls at Trinity for registering a private business there, which breached the college’s charitable status.
Two decades later, the company has annual revenues of almost $5bn (£3.6bn). Gupta is now trying to buy Tata’s UK steel operations, and if he is successful it could save thousands of jobs across the country.
Gupta, 44, was born in Punjab, north India, in the early 1970s. His father, who had left school at 11, was a successful industrialist and businessman at a time when the socialist policies of Indira Gandhi were stirring unrest in the country.
When Gupta was still a toddler, drought and an oil crisis brought the economy to its knees. Strikes and protests led to the government declaring a state of emergency, which lasted three years.
Amid the chaos of those years, Gupta’s father decided to send his son to the UK for schooling. At 12, Gupta left India and became a boarder at St Edmund’s College in Canterbury.
Everything in Britain was new and unfamiliar. Gupta scraped through his A-levels, and worked briefly for his father’s business selling bicycles in Turkey before accepting an offer to study economics at Trinity College, Cambridge.
It was there he began a business selling chemical products to Nigeria, an activity which got him into trouble repeatedly with the college dean.
Even when he was student, Gupta’s business was generating £1m a day. He switched to study economics and business management instead, which was, in his words, a “doddle” and freed up time to work on his startup.
After graduating in 1995, Gupta began trading commodities around the world. With a phone glued to his ear, he rarely took a day off.
Alongside his growing financial success, Gupta started a relationship with a woman from Essex. His strict family values meant he kept the relationship a secret for eight years, but she is now his wife.
Gupta is one of a string of Indian-born steel tycoons who have seen potential in the UK steel industry in the last decade. As Tata backs out on its investments, Gupta remains optimistic. In an article in India Global magazine he wrote: “The recovery of domestic and international demand will certainly come, it’s only a question of time.”
The businessman has taken bets on British steel in the past, reopening a Newport steel mill in October. He alsostepped in last year to save almost 1,000 jobs in the Midlands when Lord Paul’s Caparo steel empire folded, and has just concluded a deal to buy Tata’s mothballed sites in Lanarkshire, Scotland. Gupta kept all the Newport workers on half their salary for two years while the facility was upgraded.
His decision to step in and try to buy Tata’s foundering assets could prove a shrewd move. Steel prices are at rock bottom, the government is doing all it can to facilitate the deal and the UK has a wealth of experienced steel workers who know the industry inside out.
Gupta could be the man to revive British steel, but he would be getting a good deal out of it too.
Source: Theguardian.com