Belgium have been given the green light by a local court to look for a potential new owner. Liberty Steel Group confirms the sale of the assets is one potential option for their restructuring.
The plants have been put under a restructuring programme, running until the end of April 2023, to “temporarily protect the business from its creditors, while ensuring the best possible ongoing relationships with them, and ensure the continuity of the company”, Liberty says.
Liberty Steel’s Belgium-based assets include a series of lines for packaging steel located in Tilleur and two hot-dip galvanising lines located in Flemalle. The units can produce up to 1 million tonnes/year of HDG and 200,000 t/y of packaging products. They were acquired by Liberty from ArcelorMittal in 2019. Liberty Steel also controls HDG capacity in neighbouring Luxembourg.
The Luxembourg plants have been operating some rolling lines intermittently this year, with HRC feedstock supply coming from Liberty Steel’s Galati works in Romania.
Liberty Steel stresses to Kallanish it has injected more than €28 million in the Liege units since December 2021 “to ensure that its employees continue to be paid and the plants remain operationally capable”.
Emanuele Norsa Italy
