Paul Barry: The Big Steal: How steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta fooled Australia and the world. (2026)
Tue, Sep 29, 2026./noise/books | LinkKindle. A valiant and entertaining effort to pick at the seams of Gupta's financial shenanigans. Barry does not get to the nub and can't really as the corporate structures are too opaque and public accounts too inadequate. Perhaps half draws on Duncan Mavin's Pyramid of Lies (2022) about Lex Greensill and the collapse of his financing bromance with Gupta. Quite often some diagrams would've helped to make the money and notional ownership structures clearer. Some chapters malfunction; chapter 23 Sanjeev's Last Stand is a theatrical take on some court proceedings, which is jarring after the 10,000 foot view of the financial dealings we got up to that point. I think he could've dug into the InfraBuild situation some more.
In any case I was less interested in Gupta per se and more about what's happening with the steelworks at Whyalla. Barry interviewed the S.A. Premier Peter Malinauskas and minister/righthand man Tom Koutsantonis but did not interrogate their version of events. For instance, did it make sense to bet the state's energy storage/green steel transition on Gupta in February 2024, knowing what was known then? (Greensill's operation had collapsed in 2021, for instance, and Gupta was already zombie-shuffling funds amongst related entities, sucking funds out of InfraBuild and the Tahmoor Colliery.) Have they sold the generators from the hydrogen plant yet? And how much was spent on not getting the blast furnace going again? (It was already struggling in March 2024 after Gupta's operators reduced production too much.) Why has the sale date slipped from the end of September 2026 to the end of the year or perhaps March 2027? Barry observed but did not dig into KordaMentha's rushed sale of the steelworks to Gupta in 2017 — a decision that Koutsantonis claims here he did not like but could not influence — and provided us with no reason to believe they'll do a better job this time around. Barry is keen to moralise over Gupta's appropriation and misallocation of Other People's Money (and fair enough too) but gave the politicians and administrators too much of a pass.
Obviously the story is not yet complete; Barry updated a chapter recently with more details about the lawsuits over the insurance on some relevant delinquent financial instruments. It reads like the purest farce. The snail-paced UK Serious Fraud Office investigation into GFG is apparently still live. Tahmoor has been sold to a consortium including M Resources who is one of the final two-or-so bidders for the steelworks. (Does their proposal to generate hydrogen and solid graphite from natural gas make sense for anyone other than Santos? Does their technology scale? Is their financier Golden Energy and Resources sound?) And of course Gupta is still out there somewhere making promises that some choose to believe. And so on and on.
Goodreads. Barry visited Whyalla a couple of months before the steelworks got sent into administration in 2024. (This formed one chapter of the book.) Reviews are legion but do not grapple with the flaws. Most witlessly cheer on the government intervention. It is all very fascinating.
