Bluster and betrayal: Paul Barry probes how steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta hoodwinked the powerful

It is difficult to read Paul Barry’s The Big Steal without a mounting sense of outrage, not just at the British businessman Sanjeev Gupta, rightly described as a silver-tongued scoundrel, but at the greedy bankers, gullible journalists, naive politicians and incompetent regulators who allowed this global scam to happen.

Review: The Big Steal: How Steel Tycoon Sanjeev Gupta fooled Australia and the World – Paul Barry (Allen & Unwin) The story has been meticulously put together by one of Australia’s finest investigative journalists.

Barry knows the terrain of corporate skulduggery well, having written two books tracing the rise and fall of that infamous Western Australian pirate Alan Bond.

All the ingredients of the Bond story are present again, only on a global scale.

Basically Gupta’s scam worked like this.

He would buy a rundown steelworks, aluminium smelter or power station in a town heavily dependent on it: Whyalla in South Australia, Uskmouth and Newport in Wales, Galati in Romania.

Two dozen steelworks altogether across Britain, Europe, the US and Australia. (In a sad footnote, administrators this week decided to permanently shut down the blast furnace at the Whyalla steelworks, with around 500 jobs to be lost.) On behalf of one or other of Gupta’s network of firms, he would promise to invest millions rescuing these increasingly uneconomic businesses by turning them into modern, environmentally friendly assets.

Ministers of the Crown, premiers and local mayors would flock to flamboyant ribbon-cutting ceremonies hailing Gupta as the saviour of the community.

Gape-mouthed reporters would swallow this stuff whole.

Everyone wanted to believe.

No one wanted to do the due diligence.

Where was the money coming from? Had this bloke pulled off these miracles anywhere else? (Answer: no.) Having galvanised the local workforce and injected the community with hope, Gupta would fly off somewhere else and pull the same stunt again.

The people left behind laboured to keep the works going, while Gupta’s promises languished and then evaporated.

He wrung the last dollars out of these places and pocketed the proceeds.