Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2011 as news. Nueva Rumasa’s companies went through insolvency proceedings in 2011, and José María Ruiz-Mateos died in 2015. The article does not cover what happened to the noteholders.
This move by Ruiz-Mateos was to be expected. He has offered the holders of the promissory notes issued by Nueva Rumasa the chance to be paid out of the revaluation he is claiming in court for the expropriation of the original Rumasa in 1983. The businessman is relying on a ruling that went his way a few years ago, under which the state should pay for the value of the companies it expropriated from him: according to the valuation, 18 billion euros.
Nueva Rumasa says investors will be paid, and it grants them the right to collect as soon as the state pays “what it owes”.
The lawyers hired by the investors are not convinced by the proposed deal. If the debt were ever paid, the first in line to receive and use the money would be the Social Security system, then the workers and the suppliers, and only last of all the investors.
Even so, they are considering accepting it, because Carcesa (the company that issued the now-famous promissory notes) is currently in insolvency proceedings due to liquidity problems.
Ruiz-Mateos’s strategy with this proposal is very clear: this way, the investors’ own lawyers would be the ones fighting in court to make the state pay its “debt” to Nueva Rumasa as soon as possible.
Featured image: Javier Perez Montes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
