The delicate house of cards that is the industrial empire of Sanjeev Gupta, who owned the Dunkirk aluminum smelter until 2021, has just suffered a series of additional shocks in the past two weeks. In France, searches took place on April 20 in its offices in Paris and Loon-Plage (Nord).
A week later, on April 27, in the United Kingdom, the Serious Fraud Office, the British equivalent of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office, filed a formal request with the group for the release of documents. Finally, in a related matter, the British accounting regulator, the Financial Reporting Council, on May 4 opened an investigation into the auditor of Mr Gupta’s companies, King & King. Everything takes place against the backdrop of a legal battle for control of the Dunkirk foundry.
At the heart of the case is a nagging question since the Indo-British businessman appeared on the industrial scene a decade ago: how was he financed? For years, Gupta Family Group (GFG) seemed to be able to buy factories that no one wanted anymore, mainly in steel and aluminum, without apparent difficulty. At its peak, in 2019, the group claimed to achieve a turnover of 20 billion dollars (19 billion euros), with 35,000 employees, including 2,000 in France.
The President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron had received the entrepreneur with great fanfare at the Palace of Versailles for the Choose France summit in January 2019. Gérald Darmanin, then Minister for Action and Public Accounts, had traveled to Dunkirk to celebrate the acquisition of the plant, a profitable industrial flagship. GFG was then present from the United Kingdom to Australia via the United States and continental Europe (France, Belgium, Romania, Poland, etc.).
A strong opacity
In March 2021, the beautiful showcase suddenly broke. Greensill, a finance company, went bankrupt. GFG, by far its biggest customer, owed it $5 billion. Not only was the band crumbling in debt, but it didn’t really exist. GFG has never been a consolidated entity: Mr. Gupta managed an informal network of dozens of independent companies, in a high degree of opacity. With an accusation that keeps coming back: the businessman spent his time moving money from one entity to another, repaying debts on one side with the liquidity obtained on the other. Legally? “Any intergroup transaction or movement of cash was always approved and recorded according to local laws and subject to appropriate legal advice”responds the group.
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