It is difficult to read Paul Barry’s The Big Steal without a mounting sense of outrage, not just at the British businessman Sanjeev Gupta, rightly described as a silver-tongued scoundrel, but at the greedy bankers, gullible journalists, naive politicians and incompetent regulators who allowed this global scam to happen.Review: The Big Steal: How Steel Tycoon Sanjeev Gupta fooled Australia and the World – Paul Barry (Allen & Unwin)The story has been meticulously put together by one of Australia’s finest investigative journalists. Barry knows the terrain of corporate skulduggery well, having written two books tracing the rise and fall of that infamous Western Australian pirate Alan Bond.All the ingredients of the Bond story are present again, only on a global scale.Basically Gupta’s scam worked like this. He would buy a rundown steelworks, aluminium smelter or power station in a town heavily dependent on it: Whyalla in South Australia, Uskmouth and Newport in Wales, Galati in Romania. Two dozen steelworks altogether across Britain, Europe, the US and Australia. (In a sad footnote, administrators this week decided to permanently shut down the blast furnace at the Whyalla steelworks, with around 500 jobs to be lost.)On behalf of one or other of Gupta’s network of firms, he would promise to invest millions rescuing these increasingly uneconomic businesses by turning them into modern, environmentally friendly assets. Ministers of the Crown, premiers and local mayors would flock to flamboyant ribbon-cutting ceremonies hailing Gupta as the saviour of the community. Gape-mouthed reporters would swallow this stuff whole.Everyone wanted to believe. No one wanted to do the due diligence. Where was the money coming from? Had this bloke pulled off these miracles anywhere else? (Answer: no.)Having galvanised the local workforce and injected the community with hope, Gupta would fly off somewhere else and pull the same stunt again.The people left behind laboured to keep the works going, while Gupta’s promises languished and then evaporated. He wrung the last dollars out of these places and pocketed the proceeds.Where was the money coming from? Good question.An odd coupleThe other scoundrel in this story is Lex Greensill, an expat Australian who grew up on a sugar cane and watermelon farm in Bundaberg, Queensland. At a fortuitous moment, he scored a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) from Buckingham Palace. Bazza McKenzie hat, big grin. The whole stereotype.Having watched his parents struggle to make ends meet on the farm, his mission in life – so he said – was to change finance to give the little bloke a go. Armed with a correspondence course in law, he went to London, had a successful career as an investment banker and then set up his own finance company and bank.For a time he worked in the Cabinet Office of British Prime Minister David Cameron, who afterwards was taken onto the Greensill payroll.Greensill and Gupta met in 2013 or 2015 – no one seems sure. An odd couple: the self-proclaimed hayseed from Bundaberg and the dapper Indian-born graduate in economics from Cambridge. Both outsiders in British society, they forged a close bond and a close business interdependency.Gupta’s addiction to borrowing money and Greensill Capital UK’s willingness to lend it for a fat fee was a marriage of enormous convenience. But by 2025, Gupta’s empire was collapsing under the weight of about US$8 billion ($A11 billion) in debt. Corporate regulators in four countries – Britain, France, Romania and Australia – were finally getting around to investigating him and his banker.The British Insolvency Service recently did a plea bargain with Greensill which saw him banned from acting as a company director in the UK for nine years. It also made it possible that he would be personally liable for the debts of Greensill Capital UK, which amounted to US$8.4 billion (A$11.65 billion).As for Gupta, his most recent engagement with the law involved a successful application by a liquidator to wind up a Gupta company in New South Wales, Tahmoor Coal Pty Ltd. This opened the way for the liquidator to go after Gupta’s luxury homes, including one in Sydney, and his A$5 million luxury yacht. The NSW Supreme Court order was handed down in March 2026 and the fate of these assets remained in limbo at the time of writing.Justice?In a chapter of the book drily called Justice, Barry records that at least A$1 billion had been siphoned off by Gupta from Australian businesses in Whyalla, Bell Bay in Tasmania and Tahmoor, among others.Beyond Australia, May 2026 marked the fifth anniversary of the announcement by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office that it was pursuing Gupta’s company GFG Alliance for “suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering”. That, too, remains unfinished business.The trail of destruction left behind by Gupta and Greensill, writes Barry, included the bankruptcy of the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse, in which the failure of Greensill Capital UK played a significant part.Not bad for a boy from Bundaberg and his smooth-talking mate from Cambridge.But it was not this single act of spectacular devastation that impelled Barry to write his book: it was the numberless betrayals of those small communities who had believed Gupta was their saviour. Allen and Unwin One day in August 2024, Barry tells us, Gupta splashed out A$12.5 million for a waterfront apartment on Sydney’s Finger Wharf. At that very moment, in Whyalla, his loyal steelworkers were labouring in intense heat to restart the ageing blast furnace that Gupta had promised but failed to replace, and traders in the town were trying to extract from Gupta several hundred million dollars in unpaid bills.Barry wrote: “I thought it said a lot about the man.”And so it does. But it also says a lot about Gupta’s enablers in finance and the law, and about the reckless credulity of regulators, politicians and journalists who fell for the spectacle and failed to ask the most basic questions.This is not an easy read. In particular, it would benefit from a timeline at the start so the reader can keep track of developments. But it is a powerful act of long-form investigative journalism, full of lessons for those in public life who have a responsibility to expose characters like this and bring them to account.Denis Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.