Sanjeev Gupta was furious. Sitting in his office in London on June 15 last year, he had just been told in a phone call from administrators KordaMentha that a rival Korean consortium had been anointed the preferred bidder for the collapsed Arrium steel and mini-mills business in Australia and he was excluded from the process.

The British billionaire and his advisers had spent months crafting their offer, navigating through the sensitive financing and political issues associated with trying to save the Whyalla steelworks – and, by extension, a town of 23,000 people in northern South Australia relying on it for economic survival.