Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2011. It reports news about Nueva Rumasa’s unpaid wages and debts and the Social Security threat to seize assets. The group’s companies later went into insolvency proceedings, and Ruiz-Mateos died in 2015.
Following news of precautionary seizures of estates owned by Nueva Rumasa, on top of the latest seizure worth 36 million euros, Spain’s Social Security has now gone after the group directly for failing to sort out its arrears with workers and suppliers. It argues that the company has already had plenty of chances and that it will shortly proceed with a precautionary seizure of assets.
This time José María Ruiz-Mateos has chosen not to stay silent. In a statement, he expressed his sadness and “rage” at feeling persecuted and slandered, and at hearing all kinds of falsehoods about himself.
Ruiz-Mateos asks people to identify the real victim in all this, since after 28 years Nueva Rumasa still provides more than 8,000 jobs without receiving any help from the state.
He added that, after those 28 years, he has still not been paid the 18,000 million euros (18 billion) in compensation he says he is owed for the “misappropriation” of his assets when all his companies were expropriated.
“If a court ruled that the state had to compensate us for that amount and we still haven’t been compensated, who is the one not paying, and who is owed money? Having that capital available would help us deal with the current situation.”
Leaving aside the mess Nueva Rumasa is caught up in, I think the family has a point in this particular case. So far, all the news we hear is that Nueva Rumasa owes its workers several months’ wages, that Clesa (the group’s dairy company) isn’t paying, that suppliers aren’t getting paid. But headlines saying “The state is not paying Nueva Rumasa the compensation it is owed” are few and far between.
Featured image: Art y Letras Hispanas, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
