- Saturday, April 20, 2024
By: Pramod Thomas
PRAMOD MITTAL, brother of Lakshmi Mittal, who runs the world’s biggest steel manufacturer Arcelor Mittal, has been declared bankrupt with £130 million debt. Mittal, who once spent £50 million on his daughter’s wedding, lost a fortune while becoming embroiled in an investigation into organised crime, reported The Times.
He was acting as a guarantor in 2006 for the debts of Global Ispat Koksna Industrija Lukavac (Gikil), a Bosnian producer of coke used in steel manufacturing. In July 2019, he was arrested in Bosnia as part of a probe into organised crime at Gikil.
He was held for suspicious transfer of nearly €11 million from Lukavac (Bosnia)-based Gikil, which is a partnership between Global Steel Holdings (GSHL) and Coke and Chemical Conglomerate (KHK) owned by the Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The company was set up in 2003 and has over 1,000 employees.
He was later released on € one million bail but the investigation is ongoing. The release order also mandated an ‘insurance’ of €11 million deposited into a special account until the end of the proceedings.
Pramod Mittal was in the news after a lavish ceremony held for his daughter, Shristi, at the National Museum of Catalan Art in Barcelona in 2013.
Mittal was pursued by London-based Stemcor when he did not pay $166 million which was owed in 2013.
Stemcor went on to separate its non-trading businesses – which included Mittal’s guarantee – into a separate company, Moorgate Industries, which was granted the bankruptcy order at the Insolvency and Companies Court, reports said.
Pramod Mittal’s lawyer, Richard Viegas, said that a ‘complex corporate matrix’ had led to the bankruptcy order and he was pursuing an appeal.
In May 2019, Mittal got out of another sticky situation in India when his older brother Lakshmi Mittal bailed him out by paying over $200 million owed to the State Trading Corporation (STC). This helped quash civil and criminal proceedings that had slowly wound their way to the Supreme Court of India.
