UK will set 'high trust bar' for future Chinese investment after British Steel rescue, minister says

LONDON (AP) — Chinese companies will have to clear a “high trust bar” when investing in key sectors in the U.K., the country's business secretary said Sunday, a day after he took effective control of Britain’s last remaining factory that makes steel from scratch from its Chinese owners.

Jonathan Reynolds said Jingye Group, which has owned British Steel since 2020, had not been negotiating “in good faith” with the government in recent months over the future of the heavily loss-making steel works in Scunthorpe in the north of England.

Reynolds said it had become clear on Thursday that Jingye would not accept any financial offer from the government and that it was the company's intention to close the blast furnaces “come what may,” while keeping the more profitable steel mill operations and supplying them from China.

In an interview with Sky News on Sunday, he declined to accuse the company of deliberately sabotaging the business at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party, but did accept that there is now a “high trust bar” to bringing Chinese investment into the U.K.

“I personally wouldn't bring a Chinese company into our steel sector,” he said. “I think steel is a very sensitive area.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer summoned lawmakers back to Parliament on Saturday to back a bill primarily aimed at blocking Jingye from closing the two blast furnaces. The bill, which is now law, gives Reynolds the power to direct British Steel's board and workforce, ensure its 3,000 workers get paid and order the raw materials necessary to keep the blast furnaces running.

The British government had been under pressure to act after Jingye’s recent decision to cancel orders for the iron pellets used in the blast furnaces. Without them and other raw materials, such as coking coal, the furnaces would likely have to shut for good, potentially within days, as they are extremely difficult and expensive to restart once cooled.

That would mean the U.K., which in the late 19th century was the world’s steelmaking powerhouse, would be the only country in the Group of Seven industrial nations without the capacity to make its own steel from scratch rather than from recycled material, which use greener electric arc furnaces rather than blast furnaces.

The repercussions would be huge for industries like construction, defense and rail and make the country dependent on foreign sources for so-called virgin steel, a vulnerability that lawmakers from all political parties balked at.

In a separate interview with the BBC, Reynolds declined to give a full guarantee that British Steel will be able to secure enough raw materials in time to keep the blast furnaces going.

He said he would not “make my situation or the nation’s situation more difficult” by commenting on specific commercial details.

“If we hadn’t acted, the blast furnaces were gone, steel production in the U.K., primary steel producing, would have gone," he said. "So we’ve given ourselves the opportunity, we are in control of the site, my officials are on site right now to give us a chance to do that.”

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks during a visit to meet British Steel workers in Appleby Village Hall near Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, Saturday April 12, 2025. (Peter Byrne/Pool Photo via AP)

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks during a visit to meet British Steel workers in Appleby Village Hall near Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, Saturday April 12, 2025. (Peter Byrne/Pool Photo via AP)

A general view of British Steel in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, Saturday April 12, 2025. (Peter Byrne/PA via AP)

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks during a visit to meet British Steel workers in Appleby Village Hall near Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, Saturday April 12, 2025. (Peter Byrne/Pool Photo via AP)

This screen grab from PA video shows a view of the British Steel plant in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, Saturday April 12, 2025. (Jamie Lashmar/PA via AP)

DENVER (AP) — Colorado officials say President Donald Trump's administration appears to be wielding its “political power” to give unprecedented help to a former county election clerk convicted of letting Trump supporters access election equipment after his 2020 defeat.

The U.S. Justice Department is trying to intervene in the case of Tina Peters, who wants to be released from prison while she appeals her conviction. A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon in federal court in Denver.

There have been “reasonable concerns” raised about Peters’ prosecution, wrote acting U.S. Assistant Attorney General Yaakov M. Roth in a court filing last month. Peters’ case is among those the government has said it is reviewing for “abuses of the criminal justice process.”

But Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser wants Magistrate Judge Scott T. Varholak to block the Justice Department's involvement. Lawyers from Weiser's office said the Justice Department has not given any good reason why it should intervene and has just repeated Peters' arguments.

“Tina Peters was not prosecuted because of any political pressure; she was prosecuted because she broke the law. And just as they did not prosecute her for political reasons, her prosecutors will not accede to any political pressure to give her preferred treatment in sentencing or terms of confinement,” lawyers from Weiser's office said in a filing.

Varholak denied a request to allow Peters, now in a state prison in Pueblo after serving a jail sentence, to attend Tuesday’s hearing, saying its only purpose was to hear arguments from lawyers.

The lawyers who originally submitted the Justice Department’s statement, including Colorado’s acting U.S. Attorney J. Bishop Grewell, have since stepped down from the case because their office helped the state investigate Peters. They said that while they wanted to avoid a conflict of interest, they stood by the Justice Department’s statement.

Abigail Stout, a Justice Department lawyer in Washington, is now representing the federal government instead.

A state judge sentenced Peters in October to nine years behind bars after rebuking her for being defiant and continuing to press discredited claims about rigged voting machines. Peters is now trying to get a federal judge to release her while she appeals her conviction.

Peters says Judge Matthew Barrett violated her right to free speech by denying her bond while she appeals because of her outspoken questioning of the voting system. She also argued she should be released from prison while she appeals because she is protected from being punished for trying to preserve election records, which she says is a federal duty.

Jurors found Peters guilty in August for using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell access to the Mesa County election system and deceiving other officials about that person’s identity. Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Trump.

Barrett previously found Peters in contempt of court after District Attorney Dan Rubenstein accused her of recording a court hearing for a person accused of being a coconspirator, which she denied.

That conviction was overturned for lack of evidence by the state appeals court in January.

Peters says Rubenstein, a Republican, later admitted that he didn’t know if Peters was recording the hearing but still used it as a reason to encourage Barrett to sentence her to prison for the voting system breach. Her lawyers say a review found no evidence of a recording.

Trump has previously been at odds with officials in Democratic-led Colorado over issues including immigration. In March, he demanded the removal of a portrait of himself from the state Capitol because he thought it was unflattering.

His administration's attempt to involve itself in Peters' case is its latest move to reward allies who violated the law on Trump's behalf.

Previously, Trump pardoned more than a thousand people convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He nominated an attorney for some of those defendants, Ed Martin, to be acting U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia.

The Department of Justice also moved to drop corruption charges against New York’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, saying that they were tainted by “weaponization” and that the administration needed Adams’ cooperation in its immigration enforcement efforts.

FILE - Candidate for the Colorado Republican Party chair position Tina Peters concludes her speech during a debate sponsored by the Republican Women of Weld, Feb. 25, 2023, in Hudson, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)