The Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee has called for an inquiry into Liberty Steel and Sanjeev Gupta’s role at GFG Alliance after identifying a ‘series of audit and governance red flags’
The report called for the UK audit regulator, the Financial Reporting Company (FRC) to launch an investigation into Liberty Steel’s auditor, King & King who began auditing companies which Gupta was the beneficial owner for in 2015 and was appointed auditor for Liberty Steel in 2018.
The report stated that it said it found it ‘utterly unconvincing’ that the accountancy firm, which has only six partners, had the ‘capacity, expertise, or resources’ to audit the accounts of multiple large GFG Alliance and Liberty Steel UK companies representing over £2.5bn of revenue’.
In a previous committee hearing, Milan Patel, a partner at King & King told the committee that the firm was ‘very much capable’ of auditing an organisation of GFG Alliance’s size and said the firm had ‘many clients who have hundreds of millions of pounds of turnover’.
In the
