Cleanaway’s Vik Bansal set to add steel to Sanjeev Gupta’s InfraBuild

Vik Bansal has presided over a financial revolution at Cleanaway. Picture: Waste Management Review

Sanjeev Gupta’s gain is Cleanaway’s loss, with the waste management company’s CEO Vik Bansal due to be appointed shortly as the new boss of the British billionaire’s Australian steel company InfraBuild.

Bansal, who has presided over a financial revolution at Cleanaway, will lead the steel business into its expected float due later this year.

Bansal’s departure after five years at Cleanaway was announced ahead of the expected imminent disclosure by Gupta of his new steel chief.

Bansal worked at OneSteel before it became InfraBuild and then had a stint at US-based engineering firm Valmont.

Bansal left Valmont as chief operating officer to take up the position as chief executive at Transpacific, before it changed its name to Cleanaway.

His view is that company bosses should be around for either five years or 10 years, to own the changes implemented under their watch. With Cleanaway he figured his time had come.

InfraBuild is having a beauty parade this week to select brokers for its IPO, which is scheduled for the middle of the year.

Bansal is the ideal person to run the company given his stellar performance at Cleanaway, built in part on its transition from a waste management company to an integrated resource recovery firm with the stated purpose of “making a sustainable future possible for all”.

The move to InfraBuild is not yet official and Bansal has declined comment on the move.

The Cleanaway statement announcing his departure was vague, leaving open the interpretation that Bansal’s departure was prompted by the board.

This was not the case, despite some press coverage about his management style. Following complaints, Cleanaway’s board last year found his behaviour “overly-assertive” and that he had contributed to a “culture of bullying and harassment.”

Nevertheless Bansal kept his job and he will report Cleanaway’s latest earnings next month and is likely to stay to help new executive chair, Mark Chellew, potentially until a new chief can be found.

Chellew was the highly regarded boss of Adelaide Brighton before joining the Cleanaway board. CFO Brendan Gill, who was slated to leave Cleanaway, has agreed to stay to help the transition.

Bansal joined the then Transpacific in the middle of 2015 and is leaving after over five years in the job, with the weekly commuting from his Sydney home to its Melbourne headquarters taking its toll.

In his time at Cleanaway, the company’s revenue increased by 10 per cent a year, net profit by 23.2 per cent and return on capital from 3.7 to 5.5 per cent.

Staff numbers increased from 4000 people to 6500, but the revolution was converting a garbage hauling company into a resource recovery company.

This process is continuing with the establishment of a joint venture with Pact and Asahi to convert PET bottles into pellets.

The circular economy lies at the centre of the Cleanaway purpose statement which was written by Bansal when he joined ,under the headline of Footprint 2025.

It is this statement, backed by an operating model known as the Cleanaway Way, which has powered the company under his management, rewarding shareholders.

The company’s stock price was 73 cents five year ago and before the 8.8 per cent fall in the stock price to $2.37 a share it was trading at close to all time highs at around $2.55 a share, with the company’s market value at $5.4 billion.