ਸੰਜੀਵ ਗੁਪਤਾਸੰਜੀਵ ਗੁਪਤਾ

Sanjeev Gupta is an Indian-born British industrialist from Ludhiana, Punjab, who founded the Liberty House Group in 1992 while still a student at the University of Cambridge. He built that trading business into the GFG Alliance, a family group of steel, aluminium, mining and energy companies, and was once widely described in Britain as a saviour of steel.

Early life and education

Sanjeev Gupta was born in September 1971 in ਲੁਧਿਆਣਾ, Punjab, the third of four children of Parduman K. Gupta, who founded the SIMEC Group. Industry ran through the family: both his father and his grandfather were industrialists, and his father’s businesses included cycle making in Ludhiana, the city that also produced Bharti founder ਸੁਨੀਲ ਮਿੱਤਲ.

He was sent to England for his schooling and boarded at St Edmund’s School in Canterbury. After his A-levels he spent a gap year working for his father’s business, selling bicycles in Turkey, before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study economics, later described as economics and management. He graduated from Cambridge and, according to the GFG profile published by SALT, holds an MA in Economics and Management from the university.

Founding Liberty House at Cambridge

In February 1992, while he was still an undergraduate, Gupta founded the Liberty House Group as a trading business, at first working from his room in his college halls of residence. Registering a private business at that address breached the college’s charitable status, and Trinity required him to leave the halls, a story retold in almost every profile of him. He kept trading from new accommodation. Liberty began by trading goods including steel, rice, sugar and engineering products as part of the wider family business, then organised its trading under steel, chemicals and agriculture, with offices that grew to include Singapore, Dubai and Hong Kong.

Building Liberty Steel and the GFG Alliance

Gupta’s move from trading into making steel began in earnest in Britain. In 2013 Liberty bought the former Alphasteel mill at Newport in South Wales, which had been mothballed, and relaunched it as Liberty Steel Newport in October 2015. Profiles of the reopening noted that the site’s workforce of about 150 people had been kept on half pay while the plant was brought back into production. In late 2015 Liberty bought businesses of the former Caparo Industries from administration, a deal reported to have saved more than 1,000 jobs, mainly in the West Midlands.

The buying continued at pace. In 2016 Liberty acquired the Clydebridge and Dalzell steel mills in Scotland from Tata Steel in a deal brokered by the Scottish Government, and the GFG Alliance completed the purchase of Britain’s last aluminium smelter, at Lochaber near Fort William, with its hydro power plants. In 2017 Liberty bought Tata’s speciality steels business, based in South Yorkshire, in a deal reported to have saved about 1,700 jobs, and in August 2017 it acquired the Australian mining and steel business Arrium, including the Whyalla steelworks in South Australia, after Arrium had entered voluntary administration.

In 2018 the group bought Aluminium Dunkerque in France, described as the largest aluminium smelter in Europe, and expanded in the United States. In July 2019 it acquired seven steelworks and five service centres across seven European countries from ArcelorMittal, a purchase that doubled the GFG workforce at the time. That October, Gupta brought his steel businesses together as the Liberty Steel Group, and in January 2020 he grouped the aluminium businesses as the ALVANCE Aluminium Group, alongside the SIMEC energy and mining group.

What is the GREENSTEEL strategy?

GREENSTEEL is the name Gupta gave to his model for making steel with a lower carbon footprint, mainly by melting recycled scrap in electric arc furnaces and powering production, where possible, with renewable energy. He launched the strategy in 2016 as Liberty considered buying Tata Steel’s British operations. In 2019 he announced an ambition for Liberty Steel Group to become carbon neutral by 2030, a target GFG described as the most ambitious of its kind by a major steel producer. The GFG Foundation, which he founded with his wife Nicola in 2016, works on developing industrial skills among young people, and in March 2018 the then Prince of Wales appointed Gupta an official ambassador for the Industrial Cadets programme, which gives young people structured experience of industry.

Difficulties and scrutiny after Greensill

The turning point in Gupta’s public story was the collapse in March 2021 of Greensill Capital, which Reuters has described as GFG’s main lender. Its failure prompted what Reuters called a scramble by GFG to refinance its businesses. Greensill’s administrators have said they were unable to verify some invoices linked to loans to Gupta companies, reporting that is set out in detail on his reference pages. GFG and Gupta have denied wrongdoing: Reuters reported in October 2026 that GFG has denied wrongdoing and said it had struck a deal with Greensill creditors on global debt settlement terms, and the Guardian has reported that Gupta wrote in 2021 that he refuted any suggestion of wrongdoing.

In May 2021 the UK Serious Fraud Office announced an investigation into suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering in relation to the financing and conduct of the business of companies within the Gupta Family Group Alliance, including its financing arrangements with Greensill Capital UK Ltd. The SFO case page still lists that investigation in the same terms. It is an investigation, not a finding, and no conclusion from it is stated in the sources used for this page.

Separately, in October 2024 it was reported that Companies House was prosecuting Gupta over a failure to file accounts for 76 companies listed in Britain, including Liberty Commodities. He pleaded not guilty. In October 2026, Reuters reported that Britain’s Financial Reporting Council had fined the auditor HW Fisher and an individual accountant over the audit of Liberty Commodities Ltd for the year to March 2020, finding numerous and serious audit breaches. The FRC said the breaches were not intentional, dishonest, deliberate or reckless, and it did not say the company’s financial statements were misstated.

What happened at Whyalla and Speciality Steel UK?

Whyalla was the first of Gupta’s best known plants to pass out of his control. In February 2025 the Government of South Australia put the steelworks’ operating company, OneSteel Manufacturing, into administration. The Guardian reported that administrators found debts of more than A$1.3 billion, including unpaid employee entitlements, and that the state and federal governments provided a support package of A$2.4 billion to keep the works operating during administration. Reuters reported in June 2025 that the Australian government had formally opened a sale process led by the administrator KordaMentha, and that GFG said it remained the largest creditor in Whyalla Steelworks, at A$536 million.

In August 2025 the High Court in London ordered Speciality Steel UK, the South Yorkshire business Liberty had bought from Tata in 2017, into compulsory liquidation. The Guardian reported that the judge found the company hopelessly insolvent, with debts of several hundred million pounds and about £650,000 in its account, and that government appointed special managers took control of the plants at Rotherham and Stocksbridge, which employed about 1,450 people. Liberty Steel called the decision irrational and said it had the backing of the investment manager BlackRock to resume operations. The same court hearing was told that, across the wider GFG Alliance, at least 15 companies in nine countries were in insolvency proceedings.

Where Sanjeev Gupta stands today

Gupta’s story is, in outline, a Ludhiana family business taken global at unusual speed, followed by a long and public fight to hold the group together after its main lender failed. The plants he bought were, in many cases, works that other owners were closing or selling, and the jobs preserved at Newport, in Scotland and in South Yorkshire in those years were real, whatever followed. So were the losses of control that followed at Whyalla and Speciality Steel UK, and the official investigations that remain part of the record. Reference pages reported that, as of February 2025, Gupta was living in Dubai, and SALT lists Dubai as the home of Sanjeev and Nicola Gupta and their three children. His place in Punjab’s business history rests on both halves of that record: the scale of what a Ludhiana born trader built from a Cambridge student room, and the scrutiny that has surrounded the group he built since 2021.