British Steel: a £70m piece of Turkish delight?
At last, there’s some good news for industrial Britain. After a protracted search for a saviour, the future of British Steel appears to have been secured – and with it, more than 4,000 jobs at its Scunthorpe and Teesside plants. The prospective buyer – the Turkish pension fund Oyak – was chosen above several other bidders, including British-based Liberty, noted Tom Witherow and Ruth Sunderland in the Daily Mail. Oyak – also known as the Turkish Armed Forces Assistance Fund – already owns steel mills in Turkey, and is believed to be offering around £70m for the business, which went into liquidation in May, plus “a promise to invest £900m to double production”.
There’s no shortage of cash or clout here, said The Guardian. With £15bn in assets, Oyak presides over “a sprawling empire” that ranges from carmaking to energy and finance. And the unions have given the deal a cautious welcome. However, some MPs are troubled by Oyak’s reported ties with President Erdogan’s “autocratic regime” and the Turkish army: Oyak’s chairman, Mehmet Tas, is a former army general. The chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, Dr Julian Lewis, has been at pains to stress the strategic importance of keeping an industry “with a strong defence dimension” in British hands.
And all the more so, possibly, given the potential cost of this deal to the taxpayer, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. Precise details aren’t available yet, but there’s unconfirmed talk that it hinges “on a £300m support package from the Government”. No one begrudges the steelworkers their rescue, but that’s a lot of cash “for a polluting heavy industry in decline” – and currently “embroiled”, unhelpfully, in Brexit and US-Sino trade wars. “Thousands of redundant shopworkers, bookie staff and banking employees might wonder why the Government thinks steelworkers are better than them.”