Tata Steel has sold its Long Products Europe business, including its Scunthorpe plant, to investment firm Greybull Capital for a token £1 or €1.
The move will safeguard more than 4,000 jobs, but workers are being asked to accept a pay cut and less generous pension arrangements.
Greybull said it was arranging a £400m investment package as part of the deal.
Is that the Greybull that the Guardian described as ‘controversial’ last year?…
A former bankrupt who later built a consultancy business and went on to appear on Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire is to acquire Morrisons’ struggling portfolio of convenience stores, backed by a controversial buyout firm.
Greybull was one of the co-investors, alongside OpCapita, in the electrical retailer Comet, which collapsed in 2012. The deal was controversial as the backers protected their investments partly by structuring their purchase using secured loans, rather than injecting the cash as equity, prompting the then coalition government to order an investigation into the chain’s demise. The report has yet to be published.
A Greybull partner, Nathaniel Meyohas, refused to reveal if his firm’s latest investment took the form of a loan. He said: “We are structuring the deal in the standard format that you would expect us to having taken proper advice from tax advisers and lawyers.”
New documents filed at Companies House show that the company acquiring the M Local stores is owned by another UK firm, which is in turn owned by an offshore company based in Jersey.
So just how is Greybull Capital funding its takeover of the steel plants? I’m sure it is after ‘ having taken proper advice from tax advisers and lawyers.”
Has it ever had, has it now, or will it in the future have funds channelled through offshore accounts? These questions need to be answered….wouldn’t it be awful and terribly immoral if all those jobs were saved by ‘dirty’ money?
Blimey, the BBC will be all over this, in that ‘holding power to account’, thorough way they have… sometimes…
https://bbcwatch.org/2016/04/11/ngo-allegations-promoted-by-bbc-news-shown-to-be-unfounded/
Mentioned on the news that Scunthorpe manufacture rails. Doubtless, then, they have been given an assurance that they will get the contract (if they haven’t already got it) for supplying the rails for Gideon’s new train set. No chance at all of the HS2 project being stopped (i.e. that part of the EU’s TENT scheme). Will be the BBC explain all this? The question is rhetorical.
This will end badly. These things usually do. It just does not add up. Somewhere somebody is going to get rich and Scunthorpe closed.