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A review of Paul Barry's The Big Steal, which details how Sanjeev Gupta's promises to save the Whyalla steel mills with a green steel revolution ended in financial disaster.
Paul Barry's new book The Big Steal chronicles the implosion of Sanjeev Gupta's cruel fantasy that he alone could save an ageing steel industry from the laws of thermodynamics and corporate governance.
The book, reviewed here, describes a delusional psychosis of self-entitlement, a diagnosis the reviewer suggests might warrant an entire chapter in psychiatry textbooks. It is published by Allen & Unwin at $37 on September 8. Barry documents the ghastly aftermath of financial, industrial and personal disasters Gupta has left in his wake. Creditors beyond counting are baying for his hide, and the consequences will play out for years.
Did this failed steel magnate really believe he could kick-start a green metallurgical renaissance? If only he had enough time, enough credit, enough believers in his dream? It would be nice to think of Gupta as an industrial visionary born before his time, a Nikola Tesla of his day. Barry makes abundantly clear that he was no such thing.
Gupta's utopian sales pitch of clean, hydrogen-powered blast furnaces was an economic and engineering fantasy designed to milk the dreams of the desperate for whatever he could lay his hands on. Gupta was no visionary. He was at best an opportunist, and at worst, well, that will be for the courts to decide.
He is a past master at prolonging fiscal examination in courtrooms, before financial regulators, or with banks and insurance companies who stood to lose too much if his dreams imploded. Readers may remember the fanfare accompanying the seemingly miraculous appearance of a dapper British Indian billionaire coming to the rescue of the South Australian steel mills of Whyalla. The business was teetering on the brink of insolvency when he rolled into town in 2017.
Not only the mills but the entire city was facing tumbleweed irrelevance, a rusting industrial memorial to a time before Asian mills could roll out steel for half the price. Sanjeev Gupta is pictured here in 2017, after purchasing Arrium and OneSteel. Barry systematically dismantles Gupta's illusory spiel, much as Gupta himself had pulled apart and sold for scrap struggling steel and smelter businesses from Wales to Whyalla, Romania to the Ruhr.
He dissects in gruesome detail the juggling of loans, lines of credit, insurance shuffles and government guarantees that have left hundreds of thousands of workers unemployed and countless subcontractors broke. Attempting to itemise the fiscal flotations that have kept the nostrils of Gupta's sinking empire above the waterline for so many years would be pointless here.
But like a train wreck you cannot take your eyes off, Barry's forensic deconstruction of a house of cards that simply refused to collapse is irresistible reading. Companies within companies, shelves of them, insured by desperate bankers who kept them on life support when any auditor worth their salt would have pulled the plug, have kept Gupta's creditors at bay for years. The bloke talked a good dream.
And when industrial cities are about to crumble, most politicians will share the dream, at least for a while. Barry reminds us that Gupta's descent upon Whyalla as an angel of salvation was the first time most Australians had heard of him. His seductive assurance of the myriad jobs to flow from his green steel revolution was greeted by locals and the South Australian government with gleeful relief and an astonishing lack of due diligence.
Sanjeev Gupta is pictured during the early days of his tenure at Whyalla in 2018. Gupta had apparently raised vast amounts of money for unlikely salvation projects all over the planet. You would like to think Australian politicians and regulators, having witnessed the outrageous transgressions of Alan Bond, Christopher Skase and John Friedrich, would have been wary of a man with unverifiable credentials and a ravenous appetite for debt.
But no. As W. C. Fields put it, Never give a sucker an even break, and Gupta lived by Fields' creed. His dismissive, almost casual self-assurance when confronted with ghastly real-world numbers is breathtaking at times. He saw no contradiction in spending more than $10 million on renovations to his palatial Point Piper house, one of several scattered across the globe, while his creditors in South Australia went to the wall, unable to pay wages or contractors' invoices.
And if he did see one, it certainly did not bother him overly. Barry's demolition job on Gupta's reputation is by turns infuriating, with the subject not the author, and mind-bendingly complex, inevitably given the tangled corporate shenanigans shoring up Gupta's financial firewalls. But his writing is lucid, surgical and merciless. His sympathies clearly lie with the myriad workers and businesses that have paid a heavy price simply for believing in the prosperous future they had been promised.
He also takes mercy on his readers with a one-eyebrow-raised humour that lightens the load. Before introducing a baffling description of a particularly outrageous legal defence mounted in court by Gupta's counsel earlier this year, Barry warns the reader of the complexities to come. The arguments, he warns, appear on the face of it, even by Sanjeev's standards, to be scandalous.
So wrap a wet towel around your head and I will try to explain what he has attempted to do. An astonishing caper, and with Gupta under investigation in multiple countries, one that has yet to fully play out.
theage
smh:This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
The Big Steal Sanjeev Gupta Whyalla Steelworks Green Steel Revolution
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