Liberty House Group
History. LHG was founded by Sanjeev Gupta in 1992. LHG, together with the SIMEC Group, part of the GFG Alliance, purchased the Lochaber aluminium smelter plant as well as the Laggan Dam from Rio Tinto Group in November 2016. In February 2017, LHG agreed to purchase the specialty steel division of Tata Steel Europe for £100 million. The purchase included the division's facilities in Rotherham, Stocksbridge and Brinsworth in South Yorkshire and Wednesbury in the West Midlands. In July 2017, LHG purchased South Australian steelmaker Arrium which was rebadged "LibertyOneSteel" for the first year of  ownership and is now Liberty Steel. In October 2019, GFG Alliance promised to merge its steel assets into one group called "Liberty Steel Group" by year end. In 2020, LHG received European Union approval to purchase the Duffel, Belgium plant of aluminium smelter operator Aleris Inc which cleared the way for the purchase of Aleris by Novelis Inc. On 19 February 2021 ThyssenKrupp (TK) ended discussions with Liberty Steel, which had proposed to take over the former's steel unit. The TK plant at Duisburg Germany is valued by the owner at €1.5 billion but TK posted a € 960 million loss in 2020 and Liberty sought to dispossess TK for no or reverse payment. On 31 March 2021 Credit Suisse filed insolvency proceedings "against Liberty Commodities Limited" (a LHG subsidiary) " at a London court. The action was brought by a unit of another bank, Citigroup, which was acting under instruction from Credit Suisse." The Swiss bankers are on the hook for a $10 billion fund part of which was invested in Greensill Capital which had placed $3.6 billion in LHG parent company GFG, part of which had funnelled down to LCL. The balance sheet of Credit  Suisse would absorb significant damage as a result. On 2 April 2021, Gupta "claimed that none of its plants will shut 'under my watch' as he raced to refinance his business after the collapse of financial backer Greensill." Liberty Steel had some 3,000 employees, while GFG Alliance had another 2,000 "in other UK metals and engineering businesses". On 23 April 2021, it came to light that Kwasi Kwarteng of the Johnson government was the minister responsible, as Gupta had sent him a "second letter", subsequent to his first on 24 March. The ADS Group business lobby had told Kwarteng that  Liberty was a "strategic supplier and that its specialist products would be difficult and slow to replace." The first letter proposed a "tolling" arrangement which was worth "£170m to plug operating losses and stay open". In tolling contracts a party "agrees to supply raw material to be put through (the) industrial processes" of the other party.