They also filed a lawsuit in federal court in Pittsburgh against rival US steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. and Chief Executive Officer Lourenco Goncalves, as well as United Steelworkers President David McCall, alleging coordinated anticompetitive and racketeering activities designed to allow only Cliffs to acquire US Steel.
Nippon Steel Corp. and United States Steel Corp. jointly filed a pair of lawsuits in a last-ditch effort to preserve their planned merger, which was blocked last week by President Joe Biden.
The companies said Monday in a joint statement that they had filed a petition with the federal appeals court in Washington, arguing that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States failed to consider the deal on national security grounds and that Biden’s order to block it was made for “purely political reasons.”
