Ratan hailed as saviour of UK steel industry

Tata Sons Interim Chairman Ratan Tata was on Sunday hailed as the saviour of the UK steel industry after the Tata group announced a 10-year commitment of £1 billion-investment to save thousands of jobs for its embattled steelworks in the country last week. In a special feature titled Man of Steel, the Sunday Times attributes the thousands of jobs saved in the industry largely to the sacking of Cyrus Mistry and Tata stepping in as interim chairman.

“Last week’s abrupt change of heart owes much to a terse board meeting in Mumbai on October 24. At that meeting the board of Tata Sons, the parent company that sits astride an empire spanning steel to tea, sacked its chairman Cyrus Mistry and reinstated his predecessor Ratan Tata,” the report said.

Describing Tata as the “architect” of the £6.1-billion acquisition of Corus in 2007, it quoted insiders as saying that the 78-year-old tycoon was never comfortable with the idea of abandoning Tata Steel’s Welsh plant at Port Talbot – the UK’s largest steelworks.

“Now he is back at the helm, Port Talbot has won a reprieve,” it said. “As the head of the (Tata company) charity, Ratan is not like that. You don't want to get rid of vast chunks of people and create mass unemployment. Ratan was quite upset at the way he (Mistry) was dealing with Tata Steel. There were all these whispers that he (Ratan) did the wrong thing in buying Corus,” the newspaper quoted an insider as saying.