Hartlepool steel business urgently seeking buyer

Liberty Pipes is supplier to Teesworks carbon capture project

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Liberty Steel in Hartlepool (Image: Liberty Steel)

A buyer is being sought for a Hartlepool steel company, which was awarded a key contract for the planned carbon capture scheme at Teesworks.

It was confirmed on Friday that Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Steel group is seeking an expedited sale of its Liberty Pipes business in Hartlepool, part of an ongoing process of divestment since the collapse of its main investor, Greensill Capital, in 2021.

Greensill lent £3.7bn to Liberty’s parent company, GFG Alliance, leaving the steelmaking business reliant on the funding and exposed to Greensill when it became insolvent. An investigation by the Serious Fraud Office into the collapse of Greensill began in January 2024.

Liberty’s Hartlepool business has not filed accounts to Companies House since the collapse of Greensill.

It’s not clear whether the future of the business depends on finding a new owner.

Last year Liberty Pipes (Hartlepool) was issued a winding up order by HMRC. Around the same time, the bulk of Liberty’s steel businesses in the UK, Speciality Steel UK, was put into liquidation after a judge called them “hopelessly insolvent”.

The Hartlepool business was separate to this judgement, and its long-term viability appears better on the surface. Last year it started to produce the pipes that will be used to store and transport captured carbon emissions from the Net Zero Teesside power plant at Teesworks.

In just under a year they’ve delivered 51,000 tonnes of pipes for the project.

Despite Liberty’s full order book at Hartlepool, the carbon capture scheme at Teesworks isn’t entirely reliant on them.