An “advisory board” appointed by Sanjeev Gupta to address governance concerns in his metals empire has only met three times since October for sessions that lasted about half an hour, one of its members said on Tuesday.
Gupta’s GFG Alliance, a loose group of companies including the under-pressure Liberty Steel, has come under scrutiny over its corporate governance standards for months.
The collapse in March of GFG’s key lender, Greensill Capital, has cast a shadow over 35,000 jobs across the world, and forced Gupta to search for new loans and buyers of parts of its business.
An announcement on the formation of the advisory board in October hailed its “world-leading industry experience and insight”, with Gupta saying its role would be to “improve transparency across the group”. Members included the former Welsh first minister Carwyn Jones, the former Australian high commissioner to the UK Alexander Downer, and a host of former steel executives.
However, a former Liberty Steel executive who is a member of the advisory board, Jon Bolton, on Tuesday told MPs on the business select committee that its input had been very limited, despite the crisis facing Liberty. Bolton said the advisory board had met only three or four times, and that recent sessions were only “very short, half-hour meetings just to really hear a statement from Sanjeev”.
It came at a hearing in which MPs expressed exasperation at the inability of an executive from GFG to answer key questions about its business.
GFG put forward Anton Krull, who has been described as the chief financial officer (CFO) of Liberty Steel UK, one part of GFG, since April. However, in awkward exchanges Krull admitted that he was “feeling uncomfortable” during questions about the gaps in his knowledge, and said that he had been “surprised that I was being asked to attend” by his employers.
Krull said his role was to assist the businesses to produce strategic business plans and forecasts, and that issues such as company debt were controlled centrally by executives closer to Gupta. He said: “I am the CFO, but that doesn’t extend to the balance sheet in terms of the capital structure.”
He was also unable to answer why accounts for one subsidiary were overdue, and said he had not been in contact with his company’s auditors, a small firm called King & King.
Darren Jones, the Labour MP who heads the committee, said he was “concerned” that it was unclear who in Liberty Steel was responsible for asserting that each individual business was a viable going concern. Alan Brown of the Scottish National Party said it was “alarming” that Krull was not able to say what financial aid Liberty Steel had received from the UK government.
GFG Alliance was approached for comment.
