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Sanjeev Gupta is set to call in administrators to place his main commodities trading business into insolvency, marking the final chapter for one of the controversial metals magnate’s oldest companies.
Liberty Commodities, which last month renamed itself to 3349135 Limited, on Thursday filed a “notice of intention to appoint an administrator”, according to UK court records.
Liberty Commodities once claimed to trade billions of dollars in metals a year and is one of the oldest companies in Gupta’s GFG Alliance conglomerate. It was established in 1997 and traces its roots to a commodities trading operation that Gupta ran out of a dormitory room at Cambridge university in the early 1990s.
The company has not filed audited annual accounts in nearly five years, however, making the current scale of its operations and assets hard to ascertain.
Gupta is being prosecuted over his alleged failure to file accounts for Liberty Commodities and more than 70 other companies. He is contesting the charges, having pleaded not guilty at a hearing in Cardiff last year.
Liberty Commodities was one of a number of Gupta’s companies that borrowed billions of dollars through Greensill Capital, which collapsed in 2021 in part due to its exposure to the metals magnate’s troubled businesses.
After Greensill’s collapse, numerous parties named on invoices issued by Liberty Commodities denied having done business with the firm. Gupta has previously denied any wrongdoing and his GFG Alliance group has co-operated with a long-running Serious Fraud Office probe into its finances.
A person familiar with the Liberty Commodities’ operations said it had not traded with third parties for “several years”. They added that GFG was “proactively” pursuing the administration as part of a wider debt restructuring.
In recent years, Liberty Commodities has previously fended off attempts to wind its business up from investors in Greensill’s invoice-backed debt deals, such as now-defunct Swiss bank Credit Suisse and US investment firm White Oak.
Gupta stepped down as a director of Liberty Commodities in July last year. He was replaced by Kenneth Tointon, a 76-year-old semi-retired accountant who has helped prepare financial statements for a number of Gupta’s businesses in the past year.
Liberty Commodities declined to comment.