The British government opened talks on Tuesday with potential buyers for Tata Steel’s United Kingdom operations, including Sanjeev Gupta’s commodities company Liberty Group, as it stepped up its battle to find a buyer for the loss-making business.
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These issues were discussed at a meeting between British Business Secretary Sajid Javid, who flew into this city to specifically hold talks with the Tata Group top brass led by chairman Cyrus Mistry.
“What they have said is that they will allow a reasonable amount of time for this process to be completed”, Javid said.
Tata UK has been put up for sale and the Government is in emergency talks to find a new buyer to prevent thousands of jobs being lost.
The letter was sent ahead of a meeting between the leaders of Unite, Community and GMB with Business Secretary Sajid Javid to demand government action to save Tata Steel UK. As the leading candidate to purchase the facilities from Tata Steel, Liberty House has said it wants to incentivise low-carbon technologies in order to strengthen the resilience of the sector.
“The meeting is over”, a Tata Steel spokesman told AFP, declining to give further details.
Kinnock was wary of this condition, claiming it would “involve a reduction in production in Port Talbot and that would have a massive impact on the workforce”.
POTENTIAL buyers for Tata steel will be invited to come forward from Monday as the Business Secretary pledges Government support for power, plant and procurement needs.
The decision by Tata Steel to sell its United Kingdom business comes after nearly a decade after the company acquired Corus Group Plc. for US$12.9 billion in 2007. The company was losing £1 million a day for running the Port Talbot site, the largest among its steel plants in Britain. He added that he expected other interested parties to come forward once the formal sale process had begun.
On Monday following Parliamentary recess MPs part of the All Parliamentary Group on steel will meet with Mr Javid in Westminster and are likely to ask for a long time-table for the Tata sale to produce viable offers.
Gupta indicated Tata Steel’s pension fund, with 130,000 members and liabilities of nearly 15 billion pounds, could prove a barrier to rescue.
Calls have been made nationally for the Government to intervene in the steel industry.
“If we get involved in Port Talbot we will only do so on the basis that we are confident there will not be any mass redundancies”.
“They seem to be unclear about the role the Government could take in this”.
He argues that it is nearly a crime that most of our scrap steel is exported to arc furnaces overseas, many of them in Turkey, for melting down and re-using.
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Separately, Tata Steel is planning to acquire a stake in Thyssenkrupp’s European steel unit, German business paper Rheinische Post reported last week, citing government sources in Berlin.
