Just as Sanjeev Gupta sits down to explain why he is spending hundreds of millions of pounds buying up Britain’s steel industry and investing in tidal lagoon power in Wales, his mobile rings.
“Yes” he says, speaking into the phone at the speed of light. “ Yes. Yes. Well, what do you want to bid? See what we can recover. Offer them a nominal price.”
“Sorry, he says, ending the call. “That was my man who is negotiating to buy equipment from a closed down steel plant on the Isle of Sheppey.” It’s one of a dozen or so deals that Mr Gupta and his Liberty House Group are cooking up right now: yesterday he announced a significant stake in the Tidal Lagoon Power company which is building its first tidal power project in Swansea and has plans for further plants in Cardiff and Newport, and in India.
Any day now he hopes to hear whether he’s been successful at rescuing two of the steel plants being closed by Tata in Scotland, where 270 jobs are at risk. He’s already saved more than 1,200 jobs in the steel industry over the past few months, having bought the high-end engineering companies owned by Caparo after it collapsed last autumn, rescuing 1,000 jobs, and re-opened the mothballed rolled coil steel mill at Newport, saving 150 jobs.
There’s more to come. Mr Gupta is looking at a steel plant in the Middle East, talking to Tata Land Rover Jaguar about joint ventures in India, and recently bought the Tungsten Bank, which he wants to reshape into a challenger bank championing investment in industry, energy and commodities “because UK banking needs to be improved for SMEs in manufacturing”.
Truth be told, it’s thrilling here in his Mayfair office. There’s a buzz of raw energy that you don’t find in many corporate HQs. Sitting close-by are his lieutenants, waiting to catch him to talk through the various deals. An assistant from Ermenegildo Zegna, who has brought suits for him to try, is waiting too.
So who is Sanjeev Gupta, or SKG as he’s known (his 72-year-old father is PK), who is helping save the UK’s steel industry? First some facts: he is 44, born in Punjab, came to board at St Edmunds College in Canterbury in his teens after visiting his brother at school there, fell in love with the UK and refused to go back.
After A levels, Gupta took two gap years, selling bicycles in Turkey for his father’s company (his father, who left school at 11, owned Victor cycles among other businesses), then studied economics at Trinity College, Cambridge.
It was from his room in halls that his trading career took-off in 1992, first by selling ICI’s chemicals products to Nigeria, where his father had big interests through his international trading group Simec. “The Nigerians loved British products and paid a big premium for them,” he recalls.
Business was going so well that relatives helped out. “They were heady days – we were trading £1m a day.” But the university wasn’t so happy. “They threw me out of halls because you can’t have a business registered at college. I wanted to use the college address – it was a charity – because it meant the telex machine was exempt from VAT.
Source: Independent