Paul Barry’s ‘The Big Steal’ traces the wreckage left by Sanjeev Gupta and Lex Greensill – and the bankers, regulators, politicians and journalists whose credulity helped them along the way.

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.

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........

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