It does not take much effort to read between the lines that British Steel is about to be nationalised. It was made evitable by the offer to buy raw materials but with the current austerity in all but name it is going to spark off a lot of problems.
Money injected so far by Jingye was structrued as a secured loan so the fingerprints of financial engineering are all over the company and it would be a surprise if at least some of the supposed £700,000 per day losses are synthetic. It looks like a typical short-term fix orchestrated by the then-government that did little other than to kick the can down the road. It really looks like Jingye was seeing how hard it could push the government rather than negotiating in good faith.
UK energy prices are a concern but the fundamental problem is this furnace essentially only servicing a domestic market. Tata closed Port Talbot because for them the business case was to invest in the Netherlands instead which had EU market sccess. And on the world market British steel is a turkey shoot up against Chinese and Indian steel. So no exports and competition with imports within an economy already in serious trouble.
The government is utterly desperate to keep things off the books which is why Thames Water was permitted to stagger on with eye-watering bill rises, but here it is Game Over. Once a blast furnace goes into cold shutdown it has to go over a massive overhaul before it can be relit. Once shut down there is basically no turning back.
Forget about all the talk of electric arc furnaces. They are only good for recycling and there are limits to what this steel can be used for. They are a political solution rather than a proper one.
Trouble is the flood-gates are now open, because once one big-ticket thing is bailed out everyone else looks for their meal ticket, and plenty of them are at least as deserving as the blast furnance at Scunthorpe. Bailing out a failed company is not good optics for the businesses slammed by the NI rises and a panic-induced inconsistency on who is screwed and who is helped has now emerged.