On a bright afternoon in June 2015, Sanjeev Gupta stood beaming at the crowd gathered at the Celtic Manor Resort hotel near Newport. One of the industrialist’s family companies was the new sponsor for Polo at the Manor, an event regarded as a highlight of the Welsh social season.
Gupta was on a roll. The day before, he and his father, PK Gupta, had celebrated the inauguration of the latest addition to the family empire, a coal-fired power station at nearby Uskmouth.
Standing in a group alongside Alun Cairns, the Conservative MP for Vale of Glamorgan, Gupta was setting the stage for a beguiling vision in which the site would become a renewable energy hub and power the adjoining steel mill he had acquired two years before.