Sanjeev Gupta, chairman of the troubled GFG Alliance group, has claimed it has made “great progress” repairing damage in the wake the collapse of its lender Greensill Capital.
Mr Gupta, whose family owns the sprawling international group of companies, said it has completed the first phase of a debt restructuring in Australia and “injected fresh capital” into its UK steel business.
In a statement, GFG insisted its international businesses were achieving “excellent performance which is bolstering cashflow and boosting the group’s refinancing efforts”.
The group launched a restructuring committee in May after the Serious Fraud Office announced it was investigating “suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering” in relation to GFG and Greensill.
GFG, which also includes steel businesses in the UK and a stake in a major tidal array in the Pentland Firth, bought the UK’s last aluminium smelter at Lochaber and adjacent hydroelectric plants in 2016 in a controversial deal that was underwritten by a £586 million Scottish government guarantee to buy energy from the hydro plants.
GFG’s Liberty Steel owns the Dalzell and Clydebridge steel plants in Lanarkshire
Under the latest stage of the restructuring, the firm hailed the re-opening of a steel rod mill South Carolina but that its aluminium plant in Witham, Essex will close with the loss of 64 jobs. It sold two further sites in Coventry and Kidderminster to automotive supplier Evtec Aluminium for £10million.
The announcement follows a damning report into the governance of the group published last month by the House of Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) committee.
The report titled “Liberty Steel and the Future of the UK Steel Industry” commended business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng’s refusal to grant Liberty Steel a £170m bail out and cast doubt on whether Mr Gupta was a “fit and proper person” to receive government support, unless he restructured the group “into a more acceptable corporate structure and publishes consolidated accounts that are adequately audited”.
Mr Gupta said: “In just ten months since Greensill collapsed we’ve made great progress.
“We completed the first phase of debt restructuring in Australia and injected fresh capital into our UK steel business.
“We have better integrated our downstream assets with our major production hubs and
strengthened industrial relations through the formation of the European Works Council.
“The RTC (restructuring and transformation committee) has helped tighten our focus on governance, adding expertise and accountability to our decision-making, and enabling us to attract the best talent into all levels of our business.
“The strides we’ve taken have enabled our core businesses to capitalise on strong markets and deliver record production volumes and profitability.
“This has put us in a strong position to achieve the next phase of our transformation and we are already seeing strong interest in Europe, the UK and the US.
“We are on track to deliver a refinanced, refocussed business able to deliver our ‘greensteel’ vision and build value for all our stakeholders.”