The entrepreneur’s taste for grandeur was on show at Edinburgh Castle, where he recently hosted a lavish banquet to celebrate his reopening of one of Scotland’s last two big steelworks.
It marked another milestone for an outsider with bold ambitions to shake up the once-mighty but ailing British steel industry. A commodities trader with 25 years’ experience, the Indian-born businessman's private multinational Liberty House turned over about $3.5bn last year.
He is now piecing together a UK industrial jigsaw spanning metals, engineering, renewable energy and even finance — with aspirations that turn on its head the conventional wisdom about the inexorable decline of heavy manufacturing in Britain.
These plans cranked up a gear last month when Mr Gupta agreed to buy the UK's last aluminium smelter, in the Scottish highlands, for £330m from mining company Rio Tinto.
At Liberty House's Mayfair headquarters — a narrow seven-storey office in one of central London’s most exclusive areas — the 45-year-old expounds on a recent flurry of acquisitions of struggling businesses.
“We’ve done one plant after another, after another — over 30 now, and every one of them we’ve turned around. Each and every one of them was either a basket case or in some trouble or another and [now] they’re all producing positive results,” he says breathlessly.
The two historic Scottish steel factories, acquired for the token sum of £1 after being mothballed by former owner Tata Steel, will look like a bargain if he can pull off the same. Liberty will be helped by the fact that there is no legacy cost of final salary pensions. It is instead providing the kind of less generous defined contribution scheme that is commonplace today.
Yet behind the pomp of the feast in the castle lurked the spectre of a bigger prize that had eluded Mr Gupta. When Tata put its entire UK steel empire up for sale in the spring, he emerged from relative obscurity as its potential saviour.
The country’s largest steel producer was haemorrhaging up to £1m a day, hit by a collapse in prices for the metal and global oversupply. Mr Gupta’s plan for its survival involved a fundamental change of technology at the flagship Port Talbot plant in south Wales, which employs about 3,500 people.
Source: Ft