Gupta withdraws from parliamentary hearing after taking legal advice

Sanjeev Gupta, the metals tycoon behind Liberty Steel, has withdrawn from a UK parliamentary committee hearing next week that he had hoped to use to mount a public defence of his business dealings.

The business select committee had lined up the entrepreneur to quiz him about how he rapidly built up his vast GFG Alliance, which boasts $20bn of annual revenues, that is being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.

But, after taking legal advice, Gupta has informed the committee he cannot speak out because of the ongoing investigations into his empire and the commercial sensitivities, given that he is trying to sell some of his assets.

Lawyers to GFG also curtailed the evidence given to the committee by King & King, the small firm that audits dozens of Gupta’s companies.

Milan Patel, a partner at the firm, refused to answer questions about GFG at a hearing earlier this week, citing a letter from its lawyers on June 25 instructing him not to divulge confidential client information.

MPs had hoped to grill the industrialist on what former prime minister David Cameron has described as the “symbiotic relationship” between GFG and Greensill Capital, one of its main lenders, which went into administration in March.

The SFO is currently investigating fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering at GFG including its financing arrangements with Greensill. GFG has said it will co-operate with the probe. 

GFG said in a statement that it had been Gupta’s “strong desire” to give evidence. 

However, following “legal advice”, he had recognised that “efforts to provide useful oral evidence to the committee at this stage are likely to cause more frustration to its inquiries than benefit, given the concurrency of the SFO’s work”.

Gupta said he held the UK parliament and its committee in the “highest regard”. He said he would be happy to consider any written questions that the committee had and would “respond as fully” as he was able.

GFG is in the middle of a restructuring to try and put its businesses on a firmer footing and enable it to repay creditors. The loose conglomerate of companies, which includes Liberty Steel, employs 35,000 people at metalworks stretching from Wales to Australia.

The business select committee recently interviewed Anton Krull, chief financial officer at Liberty Steel, only for him to struggle to answer detailed questions about the viability of the company’s operations.

He was also unable to answer detailed questions about the extent of the government’s support to Liberty Steel during the Covid-19 crisis.

In March, Gupta begged the government unsuccessfully for a £170m bailout with ministers concerned about the opaque structure of the group.

Cameron was at the centre of a major scandal in March when the Financial Times revealed that he lobbied the Treasury and Downing Street to change the rules around Covid-19 loan schemes. Although he did not succeed, Greensill went on to access £400m of loans to eight different companies, all linked to Gupta.