José María Ruiz-Mateos, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

José María Ruiz-Mateos

Spanish businessman

Date of Birth: 11-Apr-1931

Place of Birth: Rota, Andalusia, Spain

Date of Death: 07-Sep-2015

Profession: businessperson, politician

Nationality: Spain

Zodiac Sign: Aries


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About José María Ruiz-Mateos

  • José María Ruiz–Mateos y Jiménez de Tejada (11 April 1931 – 7 September 2015) was a Spanish businessman and politician. He began by exporting wine to England.
  • He founded the conglomerate Rumasa and had considerable influence in Spanish society.
  • In 1983, the government of Spain (the Socialist Party was in office at the time and led by Felipe González) expropriated the company.
  • The government alleged that Rumasa had failed to pay millions of pesetas in mandatory taxes to the national treasury.
  • The government also claimed that Rumasa was in virtual bankruptcy and that it was still afloat thanks solely to imaginative accounting by the auditing department of the company.
  • Ruiz Mateos disagreed with this assessment.
  • He sued the government for compensation, but has yet to win in court. He was imprisoned on charges of currency smuggling, fraud and tax evasion.After several years in jail, he went back into public life, became the owner of the Rayo Vallecano football (soccer) team in 1991, and formed his own political party, as part of which he was elected to the European Parliament in 1989.
  • He also founded a new holding company, New Rumasa, with 16,000 employees.
  • There have been multiple and various court rulings on the Rumasa case both in Spain and outside Spain; the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court have both spoken on numerous judgments.
  • Ruíz Mateos was acquitted in 1999 by the Spanish Supreme Court.He was a well-known member of Opus Dei, though he was expelled from the group in 1986.Ruíz Mateos was the father of 13 sons and daughters.On 17 February 2011 the ten largest companies within the Nueva Rumasa group were declared in default and unable to make payments to their creditors after the Spanish Social Security, Royal Bank of Scotland and others requested that liens be placed on the companies' assets, nearly twenty-eight years to the day on which his original holding company, Rumasa, was expropriated by the Spanish government.

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