Real estate giant Tritax joins Blastr bid for Gupta’s former UK steel empire

A multibillion-pound real estate asset manager is in talks to join a consortium targeting a takeover of Britain’s third-biggest steelmaker.

MEZIESBLOG has learnt that Tritax Management, which manages roughly £9bn-worth of logistics and supply chain real assets, is in advanced talks with Blastr, a Norwegian green steel group, about backing its bid for Speciality Steel UK (SSUK).

Industry sources said that Tritax Management, which is the investment manager for London-listed REIT Tritax Big Box, would join Cargill, the industrial conglomerate, as part of the bidding vehicle.

Tritax’s involvement would see it providing support to Blastr in relation to the redevelopment of surplus real estate at SSUK’s manufacturing sites, as well as enabling the provision of power infrastructure.

SSUK is now under the control of the government, having been liquidated last summer after the metals tycoon Sanjeev Gupta was forced to surrender ownership of the business.

It employs well over 1,000 people at sites in Rotherham and Sheffield in South Yorkshire.

The group is a major supplier to companies in the automotive and aerospace industries.

Blastr is said to have been identified as the Official Receiver’s preferred bidder for SSUK, although it continues to face competition to buy the asset from Arabian Gulf Steel Industries (AGSI), which is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, and 7 Steel UK, which last year bought the Allied Steel and Wire site in Cardiff from Spanish firm Celsa.

SSUK’s future has been in peril for years, culminating in its collapse into compulsory liquidation last summer when a High Court judge declared that it was “hopelessly insolvent”.

Based in Norway, Blastr is run by Mark Bula, a steel industry veteran who has worked at the American companies Nucor and Big River Steel.

It has retained Evercore, the investment bank, and a leading firm of public relations advisers to advise on its interest in the business.

Evercore has separately been engaged by the UK government to advise on its strategy for the steel industry, including options which could lead to the merger of SSUK with other sector assets.

Blastr is understood to have drawn up plans to move its holding company from Norway to the UK, although it is unclear whether that move is dependent upon the successful acquisition of SSUK.

Industry sources have told Sky News that Aperam, a global stainless and speciality steel producer which was spun out of ArcelorMittal in 2011, has also been involved in recent discussions about the future of SSUK.

One said that Aperam’s expertise would be vital to a successful takeover of SSUK’s Stocksbridge site, which is focused on manufacturing specialised steel products.

Gupta himself had secured backing from third parties including BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, to try to regain control of the business amid his mounting legal and financial challenges around the world.

Blastr declined to comment, while the Insolvency Service previously said: “We can confirm that the Official Receiver continues to progress bids for the sale of Speciality Steel UK.

“This process is ongoing, with the aim to complete a sale at the earliest opportunity.”

The emergence of Tritax Management in Blastr’s consortium comes weeks after the government unveiled a steel industry strategy that will see the imposition of new import tariffs and a curb in tariff-free import quotas.

“We are closing the decades-long chapter of destructive deindustrialisation and committing instead to strengthening and sustaining Britain as a steelmaking nation,” Peter Kyle, the business and trade secretary, said last month.

The success of that strategy will in part depend on thrashing out a future for British Steel, the Scunthorpe-based producer which is legally owned by China’s Jingye Group but which was seized by the government last April amid a threat to close its remaining blast furnaces.

British Steel is costing taxpayers a daily seven-figure sum to subsidise, and is expected to be fully nationalised through the introduction of new legislation, the Financial Times reported last week.

The government recently made an offer worth tens of millions of pounds to compensate Jingye, which was rejected by the Chinese group.

In 2024, ministers agreed to provide £500m in grant funding to Tata Steel, the Indian company, to install an electric arc furnace at its Port Talbot steelworks in Wales.

Blastr and Tritax Management declined to comment.