BACK in 2016, I got a call from a friend in London with a curious tale to tell. He had been at a dinner the previous evening, sitting next to Sanjeev Gupta, the man behind the GFG Alliance group of companies.

They had just taken over the Dalzell and Clydebridge steelworks and my friend had been astonished by Mr Gupta’s indiscretion when gleefully recounting tales of his dealings with the Scottish Government. “It was basically a case of ‘how much do you want’ and ‘are you sure that’s enough?’."

I parked that story in the memory. Even then, there were doubts around the Gupta business model. But fair enough – every government wants to believe in entrepreneurs who promise to save traditional industries and Mr Gupta had already been crowned “saviour of steel” for acquisitions in South Wales and Yorkshire.

When he turned his attention to the last remnants of Scotland’s steel industry, it would have been difficult for any politician to turn him away at the door. As it was, the Scottish Government bought the plants from Tata Steel, lent Gupta £7 million to buy them and threw in a barrowload of sweeteners. Nobody was too interested in asking about value for money; jobs had been saved.

It was what happened next that set the memory bells ringing. In November 2016, the Guptas were back again as saviours of Scottish industry, acquiring the assets of Rio Tinto in Lochaber. These included hydro stations at Kinlochleven (since disposed of) and Fort William as well as the UK’s last aluminium smelter, linked to the hydro supply and also vast land holdings running to over 100,000 acres.

Again, it looked on the surface like a providential intervention. What the public did not have any idea of was, of course, the terms of Scottish Government support. These would only emerge later, thanks to Gupta-watchers who were increasingly puzzled by the family’s business structures and apparently limitless ability to fund the purchase of assets that nobody else could make pay and then run them as going concerns.

Shortly after buying the smelter, and amidst many headlines, GFG announced extraordinary plans to create 2000 jobs at an aluminium wheel factory in Fort William, with Gupta investing £120m. “Today is the start of an exciting new chapter in Scotland’s manufacturing story,” said Nicola Sturgeon on a visit to the smelter the following month.

From those of us who have been around for a while, the reaction was somewhat different – complete scepticism and “we’ll believe it when we see it”. Modern Highland history is littered with grandiose schemes that never came to anything but which involved large sums of public money being handed over before anyone noticed.

In 2017, the Reuter’s news agency investigated the Guptas and found that the Lochaber deal was fuelled by complex financing, underpinned by the Scottish Government, which guaranteed the smelter’s power purchases from the hydro-plant for the next 25 years. Financier Lex Greensill packaged up and sold on that guarantee as securities with a value of about £575m – a fairly eye-watering sum, even by Scottish Government standards.

In due course, the wheel factory received planning permission amidst another flurry of publicity in 2018 – but then all went quiet until, last December, the whole thing was abandoned. Instead of employing 2000 people to make wheels for cars, there was to be a factory producing aluminium water bottles.

This week, even that seems unlikely. The pack of cards is on the verge of collapse with the Greensill operation in administration. Thousands of jobs are on the line and we can only hope there is another trick in the Gupta box that will save them, whether in Scotland, England or Wales.

Then there is the land question. At the time of the Lochaber deal, a condition of Scottish Government involvement was supposedly that GFG would facilitate a community buy-out. Indeed, a community bid to acquire the land at that time was rejected on the basis of that assurance.

As recently as December, a local councillor, Ben Thompson, drew attention to the fact that there had been “zero progress after four years”, adding: “It is especially frustrating because the Scottish Government indirectly owns at least 75 per cent of the company which owns the estate. They have huge influence to make a transaction happen.” Does the MSP, Kate Forbes, have a view?

There is a school of thought that it is always justified to spend money to save jobs, even if they don’t last, and no government can be blamed for doing so. Eventually, however, even this accident-prone Scottish Government must understand that relying on headline-grabbing interventions in times of crisis does not add up to an industrial policy.

A statement is needed at Holyrood to answer key questions: How much has gone into the Gupta businesses and what does that exposure now run to? How recently has money been handed over and on the basis of what diligence? What steps were taken through these deals to safeguard the public interest?

And by the way, when is Scotland going to have a serious policy for manufacturing industry?

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