GFG Alliance financed Liberty Steel on invoices for unsold goods, then its lender vanished

Sanjeev Gupta's GFG Alliance grew from a metals trader into a global steel and aluminium group by buying distressed plants across the UK, Australia, France and elsewhere, one deal after another. Much of that expansion ran on supply-chain financing from Greensill Capital, including 'prospective receivables' facilities — loans secured against invoices for goods GFG had not yet sold to customers who had not yet ordered them, rather than against completed sales.

When Greensill collapsed into insolvency in March 2021, it had roughly $5 billion of exposure to GFG Alliance. That financing disappeared overnight. Liberty Steel asked the UK government for a £170 million emergency loan; ministers rejected it within days, leaving roughly 3,000 UK steelworkers' jobs in question and forcing GFG into years of ad hoc refinancing, asset sales and plant-by-plant survival.

The UK Serious Fraud Office opened a criminal investigation in May 2021 into suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering in GFG's financing arrangements with Greensill, and raided GFG addresses in April 2022. Companies House separately pursued GFG for failing to file accounts at more than 70 UK subsidiaries, and legal filings put GFG's still-unpaid debt to Greensill's creditors at $870 million years after the collapse.

GFG announced commercial terms for a global debt settlement with Greensill's creditors in February 2025, intended to deleverage the group and unlock refinancing across its Australian, US, UK, Romanian and Italian operations. It came too late for Liberty's speciality steel business: in August 2025, a UK court ordered the compulsory liquidation of Speciality Steel UK, whose Rotherham and Stocksbridge plants employed about 1,450 people, putting the business into the Official Receiver's hands while a buyer is sought.