‘Tata to delay call over Port Talbot’

LONDON: Tata Steel will announce the sale of some of its speciality businesses in Britain but further delay a decision on the future of its Port Talbot plant, which

LONDON: Tata Steel will announce the sale of some of its speciality businesses in Britain but further delay a decision on the future of its Port Talbot plant, which it put up for sale earlier this year, the BBC reported.

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Britain’s Business Secretary Sajid Javid is due in Mumbai on Thursday to meet Tat a Chairman Cyrus Mistry and the BBC said that the Brexit vote had partly caused the delay in selling the Port Talbot facility in southern Wales.

“The delay will be nominally to do two things: one, to assess the impact of Brexit while they mull that over and secondly to see whether there is any result on what can bed one about the pension fund ,” a BBC business correspondent told BBC radio.

Meanwhile, Liberty House Group announced plans to bid for two units of Tata Steel’s British business — specialty steels and pipeline tubes — which operate independently of its Port Talbot plant, an industry source said.

“Liberty will be bidding but that’s not the solution to the lack of competitiveness of the UK steel industry. If Tata are forced to hold on (to Port Talbot), there’s a great danger the business will decline,” said a source close to Liberty.

The sale of the units comes as Tata Steel is set to hold a board meeting in Mumbai on Friday, and Britain’s business secretary Sajid Javid is expected to fly to India to meet the board.