The furnaces at Scunthorpe had been burning through £700,000 per day in losses when Jingye Group, the Chinese company that paid £70 million for British Steel in 2020, concluded in 2025 that the steelworks were no longer financially viable. What followed was not a controlled wind-down. It was a sequence of escalating government interventions that ended on July 17 when the UK formally transferred full legal ownership of British Steel from Jingye to the state, triggering a formal protest from Beijing that described the action as having “seriously damaged” the legitimate interests of Chinese investors in Britain. The ... (full story)