Kingspan loses €1.5bn in value amid UK minister's pressure on companies to pay building refurbishing costs

The British government have expressed their desire to get manufacturers of potentially dangerous cladding to pay for "a significant portion of the total remediation costs" for risky buildings.

Grenfell Tower: 72 people lost their lives in the June 2017 fire. The British government have expressed their desire to get manufacturers of potentially dangerous cladding to pay for "a significant portion of the total remediation costs" for risky buildings.

Kingspan which makes insulation panels lost around €1.5bn from its stock market value as it emerged that UK Housing Minister Michael Gove has stepped up his campaign to get manufacturers to pay for potentially dangerous cladding and insulation on buildings in Britain following the deadly 2017 fire at the Grenfell Tower  in London.

Mr Gove has written to British industry group, the Construction Products Association setting a March deadline for the manufacturers to reach an agreement on ways to pay for "a significant portion of the total remediation costs" for risky buildings. He had written a similar letter to property developers earlier this month.

Without naming the companies, Mr Gove wrote that three companies most closely associated with the Grenfell disaster had generated more than £700m in profits over the last four years. The fire at Grenfell in June 2017 cost the lives of 72 people.   

Denial

Kingspan started to give evidence to the Grenfell Inquiry over a year ago. The Irish company is one of Europe's largest suppliers of insulation panels and has repeatedly said it was not involved in the exterior cladding and that only a small amount of its so-called K15 product was supplied and "substituted without our knowledge" at the Grenfell Tower. 

Mr Gove intervened last month with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team and Ulster Rugby over sponsorship deals with Kingspan because, he said, the Grenfell Inquiry has still to be completed. Shares in Kingspan fell around 11% today to value the Co Cavan-based manufacturer at around €14.4bn. They have fallen now about 25% since the start of the month.