TATA Steel will begin the formal process of selling its United Kingdom plants – including those in Rotherham – by Monday, the business secretary has said.
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Besides a two-hour long meeting with Mistry and other top officials at Bombay House, the iconic headquarter of the Tata Group, Javid also met Tata Steel’s Group Executive Director Koushik Chatterjee.
Speaking after a meeting with company bosses in India, Sajid Javid, said a number of groups had come forward but only named Liberty Steel as being interested.
“The next step is for Tata to define the formal sales process and request indications of interest from potential buyers”.
Tata Steel UK employs around 15,000 people and the British Government is keen to save these jobs in an already bad economic environment, especially for the steel industry which once was among the most prominent ones in the country.
Mr Javid was meeting Tata chairman Cyrus Mistry for the first time since the firm announced the sale a week ago.
The Guardian’s Elliot notes that trade unions “are rightly deeply sceptical about a takeover by Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty House… since it would involve the closure of the blast furnace at Port Talbot, with long-term implications for the United Kingdom steel industry”.
Mr Gupta said: “There are issues to resolve which will become more apparent as prospective buyers do their due diligence”.
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.
A potential buyer for Tata Steel UK has said energy from the proposed £1bn Swansea tidal lagoon project could help the business.
Gupta’s Liberty Group is a metals company with assets in Asia, Africa and Britain, and production capacity in steel exceeding 3 million MT a year. This echoes the comments from Javid that the government could step in to lessen the burden of huge pension-scheme deficits as well as other support. His “objective” would be to avoid redundancies.
The Labour Party has termed it a national crisis, wanting the steel industry to be nationalised.
Meanwhile Archbishop of Wales Dr Barry Morgan said steel-making communities will be “crushed” if Tata’s plants close.
One month before of the historic Paris climate talks, a 130-page report was released calling on governments and big businesses to revamp energy efficiency policies and embed a sustainability mind-set.
“The main problem we see is the blast furnace, because they are importing all their own materials”, Gupta said.
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According to the FT, Gupta said that in order for him to agree to the purchase, “the government would have to remove pension and environmental liabilities for the Port Talbot plant” and he has also “called for lower power costs for steel plants”.
