A crucial week in which the future of the struggling British business is likely to be decided in its Indian parent company’s boardroom would have a final list of the potential buyers of Tata Steel UK as the final bids have been submitted from the interested parties.

There is a slim chance that a single favored bidder will emerge after Tata’s board examines the proposals at a meeting in Mumbai on Wednesday and is likely to announce a shortlist of bidders on the same day.

With the aim of discussing the sale process and highlighting the UK government’s involvement in the rescue bid with company bosses, Sajid Javid, the business secretary of UK is slated to reach Mumbai. Javid is accused of failing to travel to India when Tata decided to pull out of the UK.

Tata Steel UK is Britain’s biggest steelmaker and employs about 12,000 people and includes the blast furnace plant at Port Talbot in south Wales. There are reports that up to seven possible buyers have been working on proposals to buy the steel factory.

In March, Tata, the Indian conglomerate, had announced its intention to sell its UK steel business. The business was bought in 2007. Undercut by cheap Chinese imports and saddled with high business costs, the business was losing an estimated £1m a day.

Tata said that Monday was the deadline for final offers and has said on 9 May it had put seven expressions of interest in the business through to the next stage of the sale process. Liberty House, the metals group headed by Sanjeev Gupta, and Excalibur Steel, a management team led by Stuart Wilkie, who runs Tata’s strip products business, which includes Port Talbot are the potential buyers who have been included.

China’s Hebei Iron and Steel; JSW Steel of India; Endless, a US private equity fund and Greybull Capital, the investment company that has agreed to buy Tata’s long products business were the other potential bidders.

As Excalibur denied speculation that Wilkie and other senior team members were ready to join up with Liberty House made the bid process acrimonious. While informing Tata its team would move over to support Gupta’s bid, Excalibur would submit its own offer, an industry source had suggested.

“The suggestion that Stuart Wilkie is going to join the Liberty Steel bid is completely untrue”, Roger Maggs, Excalibur’s chairman, told the BBC. The same applied to other members of Excalibur’s management team, a spokesman added.

Gupta has said he wants to shift Port Talbot away from manufacturing steel from imported raw materials to recycling scrap steel and said he intended to buy the entire Tata Steel UK business.

With capacity expanded to take stripped steel from Liberty’s plants in Newport and Scotland, Liberty House’s plan is said to have evolved to ensure the Port Talbot blast furnaces stay open.

With hundreds of millions of pounds of loans and grants and a possible equity stake, the government has offered to back a bid. Directly and through the supply chain, about 40,000 UK jobs are judged to depend on Tata Steel UK.

(Adapted from The Guardian)