World steel producers are interested in buying the Belgian plants of Liberty Steel

World steel producers have expressed interest in acquiring two steel plants of the Belgian Liberty Liege, a subsidiary of the British steel company Liberty Steel. SteelOrbis reports about it with the reference to the local Belgian press.

Indian JSW Group, Luxembourg ArcelorMittal and Russian NLMK registered interest in buying assets. Companies are showing interest in the Tilleur and Flémalle plants.

Liberty Liege Flemalle has two hot-dip galvanizing lines for coils, and Liberty Liege Tilleur has lines for the production of packaging steel. The two enterprises are capable of producing up to 1 million tons of hot-dip galvanizing rolls per year and 200,000 tons of packaging steel products. Liberty Steel acquired these assets from ArcelorMittal in 2019.

In December 2022, a court in Liege, Belgium, appointed a provisional administrator and legal representative of Liberty Liege to accelerate the sale of the Flemalle and Tilleur plants. In addition, Liberty Steel also controls a steel plant with hot-dip galvanizing lines in Luxembourg. The company is temporarily closed, but not officially for sale.

As GMK Center reported earlier, the Belgian court previously approved the restructuring of Liberty Steel’s assets in Belgium. This could be the start of a possible sale of Belgian assets. As part of this process, which aims to protect the business from creditors, the assets will be put up for sale in whole or in part as part of a legal process until April 2023.

Also, concerns about insolvency of the Sanjeev Gupta’s company arose after the bankruptcy of the company Greensill Capital – the main creditor of Liberty Steel.

Liberty Steel intends to sell three non-core steel mills in the UK. Sanjeev Gupta’s company already started the official sale process of Liberty Aluminum Technologies and Liberty Pressing Solutions.