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Sanjeev Gupta is about to name in directors to put his predominant commodities buying and selling enterprise into insolvency, marking the ultimate chapter for one of many controversial metals magnate’s oldest firms.
Liberty Commodities, which final month renamed itself to 3349135 Restricted, on Thursday filed a “discover of intention to nominate an administrator”, in keeping with UK courtroom information.
Liberty Commodities as soon as claimed to commerce billions of {dollars} in metals a yr and is among the oldest firms in Gupta’s GFG Alliance conglomerate. It was established in 1997 and traces its roots to a commodities buying and selling operation that Gupta ran out of a dormitory room at Cambridge college within the early Nineties.
The corporate has not filed audited annual accounts in almost 5 years, nonetheless, making the present scale of its operations and belongings laborious to establish.
Gupta is being prosecuted over his alleged failure to file accounts for Liberty Commodities and greater than 70 different firms. He’s contesting the fees, having pleaded not responsible at a listening to in Cardiff final yr.
Liberty Commodities was one among plenty of Gupta’s firms that borrowed billions of {dollars} by way of Greensill Capital, which collapsed in 2021 partially as a result of its publicity to the metals magnate’s troubled companies.
After Greensill’s collapse, quite a few events named on invoices issued by Liberty Commodities denied having done business with the agency. Gupta has beforehand denied any wrongdoing and his GFG Alliance group has co-operated with a long-running Critical Fraud Workplace probe into its funds.
An individual conversant in the Liberty Commodities’ operations stated it had not traded with third events for “a number of years”. They added that GFG was “proactively” pursuing the administration as a part of a wider debt restructuring.
In recent times, Liberty Commodities has beforehand fended off makes an attempt to wind its enterprise up from traders in Greensill’s invoice-backed debt offers, equivalent to now-defunct Swiss bank Credit Suisse and US funding agency White Oak.
Gupta stepped down as a director of Liberty Commodities in July final yr. He was changed by Kenneth Tointon, a 76-year-old semi-retired accountant who has helped prepare financial statements for plenty of Gupta’s companies previously yr.
Liberty Commodities declined to remark.
