This Recharge hasn’t recharged – Steel yourself for worse.

The NTI newsroom reported on the Administration of Britishvolt back when it occurred in January this year and the latest does not make a pretty sight. 

The business and assets were sold to Recharge Industries, an Australian firm, owned by Scale Facilitation, a New York-based investment firm run by financier David Collard.  The total sale consideration was £8.57million with £6.1million paid on completion.  The balance of £2.47million remains outstanding and is now months overdue.

Whilst most of Britishvolt's staff were made redundant after the company entered Administration, several were kept and transferred to Recharge.  Some of these employees have reported to the BBC they have not been paid since July, pension commitments have also been missed and they are unable to work as they have been prevented from doing so as a result of an unpaid IT contractor stopping access to the system.

If you were thinking the £2.47million due would be Mr Collard’s main concern, then you would be wrong.  A further £11million is needed to pay property investors with claims over the site (not even a property yet, just a building site) before a spade can hit the ground.  And that’s not all, with Mr Collard’s investment firm having been the subject of a tax raid by Australian police earlier this year.

Sources within Recharge Industries (notably not Mr Collard) insist funding from a new investor is due within days and that will enable the deal to be fully charged and ready to proceed this week.  However, one unpaid employee who had heard similar messages before described this as the initials of British Steel, but we think he probably meant cow manure.

Other employees likely to be reaching for the profanities this week will be those employed by British Steel at its blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, where unions estimate that up to 2,000 jobs are at risk. 

British Steel has announced plans to close the furnaces in Scunthorpe and replace these with two electric arc furnaces (which melt down and repurpose scrap steel rather than making brand new steel – thankyou Google for explaining that to me) in a £1.25billion plan to make the company “clean, green and sustainable”.  Aren’t these triplets supposed to rhyme or be alliterative?

However, it announced the plans were still “subject to appropriate support” from the UK government, which clearly means money, and probably lots of it.  By way of comparison, Tata Steel (the other big player in the UK) announced earlier in the year it would close its two blast furnaces in Port Talbot and replace them with electric arc furnaces, with an expected loss of up to 3,000 jobs.  It will receive £500m of government support, so it would seem probable Mr Hunt will have to find another chunk of money from somewhere, whilst muttering British Steel under his breath as he rewrites this month’s Autumn Statement.