Sanjeev Gupta: the family man behind the company tipped to save UK’s steel industry

The multi-millionaire who is about to save thousands of jobs in the UK steel industry didn’t have the most auspicious starts to business. Starting his company, Liberty House, in his college bedroom at Cambridge University, Sanjeev Gupta was thrown out of halls for using the address as his VAT claim, breaching the college’s charitable status.

Switching to a management degree in his final year saved him, he graduated with a 2:1 and has not looked backed since. Liberty House has now evolved into a $6 billion business which employees 2,000 people in five different sectors which includes steel, power, energy financial services and property.

The 44-year-old was born in Punjab, India, where his father was an industrialist who owned Victor cycles among other businesses.

He moved to the UK in his early teens, attending boarding school at St Edmunds College in Kent, fell in love with the country and refused to go back.

Alongside his successful business, Gupta also began a relationship with a woman from Essex, Canvey Islands. They kept their relationship secret for eight years before marrying due to Gupta’s strict family values. Now she’s the “most popular one” in the family, according to the businessman.

“Luckily my wife, Nicola, knows the business so she gives me a lot of rope. She used to look after my money – she was the treasurer of one of my businesses – and now she spends it,” he said in an interview with the Independent.

His firm has bases in London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai where Gupta lived with his wife and their three daughters until last year.

The family has now returned to the UK, for Gupta to oversee work at his recently-acquired Newport steel works plant, and lives in a mansion in Chepstow on the Welsh/English border.

“It’s important for the family to have a proper base. I feel Indian and British and want our children to have strong roots in both culture,” he said.

Gupta has already saved more than 1,200 jobs in the steel industry over the past few months, having bought the high-end engineering companies owned by Caparo after it collapsed last autumn, rescuing 1,000 jobs, and re-opened the mothballed rolled coil steel mill at Newport, saving 150 jobs.

Now the owner of the only company to publically express an interest in Tata’s plant, Mr Gupta stressed that a takeover could involve long and complex negotiations.

“There is no definite in anything, it is very early days. We have to engage with Tata, we have to then make a proposition. I believe we will make a proposition but that proposition has to be accepted and it depends on who else we are competing against,” he told the Guardian last week.