No guarantee that British steel plants will be able to continue, says the commercial secretary | British steel

The commercial secretary refused to ensure that the Altiforni of Scunthorpe will receive raw materials in time, saying the Action of the emergency government It meant that now there was a “tall bars” for Chinese companies to invest in critical industries in the United Kingdom.

Jonathan Reynolds refused to directly accuse the British Jingye steel owner of sabotage the system, but it is understood that ministers do not expect the company to return to any negotiation.

“It may not be sabotage, it may be abandoned,” Reynolds said to the BBC. “The conscious decision not only not to order raw materials, but to sell existing supplies of raw materials, is the significant change that has requested the government to intervene”.

Reynolds stated that the costs for the closing economy of the system and the loss of the country manufacturing capacity of the country – in addition to the main losses of jobs involved – would have been at least £ 1 billion, more than losses provided for by nationalizing the plant.

A decision on complete nationalization should be taken in the next two weeks if the plant can continue to work.

Reynolds told the BBC Laura Kuenssberg that he would not have “made my situation more difficult or the situation of the nation” by providing more details that the steel blast Furnaces would have been able to continue working. If the short raw material ovens become obsolete.

Speaking the next day Parliament approved a one -day invoice that took emergency powers To get control of the SCUNTHORPE website, Reynolds said that the United Kingdom has “given the opportunity, we have the control of the site, my officials are on the spot at this moment to give us the opportunity to do it”.

But he said it was too commercially sensitive to confirm in both cases if the government could guarantee that the plant would continue to work.

The Chinese company Jingye, which he purchased British steel In 2019, he had stopped ordering multiple raw materials and had started selling the supplies he already had, decreasing an offer of £ 500 million support and refusing to ensure that the ovens could continue to work.

“It became clear for me and for the government, no financial offer of generosity would have been accepted,” said Reynolds. “This was the situation on April 10, on Friday we had an agreement from the cabinet. On Saturday Parliament was remembered, and here we are.”

The commercial secretary told Sky News that there was now a “tall bar” for bringing Chinese investments to the United Kingdom and said that it would not have allowed a Chinese company to invest in the “sensitive” steel sector.

Reynolds said that the company has had annual losses of £ 233 million and that figure “can be improved”. But he said that the cost of nationalization had to be compared to the cost of allowing the system to go below.

He said he wouldn’t mean further loans to nationalize the plant. “We have an allocation in the first budget for a steel bottom of over £ 2.5 billion. If we are spending some money to support, in the short term, in steel, I think it is better for the taxpayer than spending a greater sum of money for a transition with a company I am not sure that I can rely or to be frank … the complete collapse, with a cost for the excellence of many).

“If this had decreased, that number of jobs, the remediation of the ground, the support to those who have lost their jobs, would be well over a billion pounds”.

Reynolds said he would not have accusations of Chinese state interference, but said that the company “was not (acting) in the type of rational way that we would expect a company to operate in a market economy”.

The leader of the reform UK, Nigel Farage, accused Jingye of lying on the accounts of the companies and said he was “100%” that the Chinese government had ordered Jingye to buy British steel to close the activity. Farage did not offer evidence for these accusations, but said he was based on his “intuition”.

“Because you think that, yesterday morning, the unions acted to prevent Chinese officials even to bring their cars to the plant? Because they feared industrial sabotage,” Farage said.

The General Secretary of the Commercial Union Gmb, Gary Smith, confirmed that the workers had acted to prevent the company from accessing.

“We were worried about industrial vandalism and there was a concern about sabotage on the site, frankly,” he said. “And yesterday, the workers prevented the managers of the Chinese owners from going on site.

“I am sure that people are still very worried about this, but these people performed heroes yesterday to make sure they have a possibility of combat for the steel industry in this country. They were legitimately worried about industrial sabotage.”