Forty years since Rumasa's expropriation from Ruiz-Mateos: the truth about 23F

The attempted coup d'état—led by military commanders in Madrid and Valencia—on February 23, 1981, was one of the key moments that shaped Spain's history. However, exactly two years later, on February 23, 1983, another event of social significance left its mark on the memory of Spaniards: the expropriation of the company Rumasa.

In his book Isabel y Miguel: 50 años de historia de España, Juan Luis Galiacho—director of elcierredigital.com—recounts the criticisms and harsh actions by businessman José María Ruiz-Mateos Jiménez de Tejada against Miguel Boyer—who at the time was part of Felipe González's government as Minister of Economy and Finance and who stripped the businessman from Cádiz of control over Rumasa.

The expropriation of the powerful business conglomerate brought judicial, political, and economic consequences that would drag on for years, with Boyer and Isabel Preysler always involved.

The truth about February 23, 1983

Everyone expected that the night of February 23, 1983, something of great political and business significance would happen. The then Minister of Labor and Social Security, now Vice President of the European Commission, Joaquín Almunia Amann, had already made sure to announce it: "Something important is going to happen tonight," creating great media anticipation hours in advance. Everything was ready. Miguel Boyer and his men had everything tied up for days. They had named the operation with the code name "La Red" ("The Net"), which defined the government clampdown that was closing in on Rumasa.

The first thing they did was to centralize, together with the Bank of Spain and the tax inspection services, all information related to the bee holding. Thanks to this, the true situation of the business entity became known: with large debts and subjected to a thorough audit by the firm Arthur Andersen. Meanwhile, the media were already warning about the poor condition of Rumasa's banks.

It was on February 18, 1983, when the alarm was raised for the first time. The Minister of Economy himself, in a meeting with journalists, indicated the possible refusal of Ruiz Mateos to authorize Arthur Andersen's auditors to conduct a broad investigation into Rumasa, which would lead to the intervention of Bank of Spain inspectors. All newspapers at the time echoed Boyer's words.

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That was like the starting bell. One of them, Diario 16, headlined its front page the next day in large letters with a clear and premonitory phrase: "Boyer threatens Rumasa," and with a subtitle that read: "If he doesn't allow Arthur Andersen's audit to continue." That same day, in a long written statement, typical of Ruiz Mateos's approach, the businessman assured that his holding was completely solvent and liquid and blamed Miguel Boyer for any consequences that might arise from his words. From then on, with such a heated atmosphere, events unfolded rapidly.

People close to the businessman from Cádiz state that Boyer only met with Ruiz Mateos once to discuss the matter personally. That was two days before the expropriation took place. It was then that the Minister of Economy proposed to the owner of the bee holding to reach an agreed settlement. His natural anger, Boyer's famous "satanic pride," was replaced by a conciliatory stance that would lead them to close a deal.

The meeting between Boyer and Ruiz-Mateos

This change was due to the pressure he had received from, among others, his friend, the then Deputy Governor of the Bank of Spain, Mariano Rubio, who was not a strong supporter of bank expropriation, nor were the main financial offices in Spain's capital. Months earlier, Ruiz Mateos himself had written a letter to President Felipe González, congratulating him on his electoral victory and explaining the importance of the Rumasa group for the Spanish economy, reportedly manipulating the results.

The meeting was held at the Ministry of Economy itself, on Alcalá Street, and it is said that Boyer, nervous and apparently disheveled and angry, could not stop smoking one cigarette after another. Ruiz Mateos himself says that Boyer was sweating as if it were the middle of August in Andalusia instead of February, and the minister was suffering the rigors of 104°F (40°C) in the sun. However, despite his sweating, he kept a hermetic, impassive face. The minister did not want to hear or pay attention to the arguments and reasons the businessman put forward in his defense. He only followed to the letter the instructions he had memorized. Just a few minutes into the meeting, he warned him very seriously:

–"Listen to me, Mr. José María, the only solution is for you to sign this letter, in which you commit to reducing your expansion policy and, instead, to accelerate the audit that Arthur Andersen is trying to carry out on Rumasa's banks and companies. When they're finished, they will be delivered directly to the Bank of Spain instead of being received first by Rumasa. The Deposit Guarantee Fund must know firsthand how the results are going without the intimidating presence of your executives," he told him.

But Ruiz Mateos, following the advice of his advisors, did not sign the letter that had been placed on the table, previously written by the Ministry's advisors and addressed to Miguel Boyer:

–"Dear Minister, I will not legitimize my death sentence. The audits must be received first by Rumasa, since we are the ones paying for them and, moreover, we commissioned them. Furthermore, they were commissioned very recently and could take years given the complexity and variety of the companies and sectors," the businessman from Cádiz replied firmly.

Time passed, the meeting dragged on, and nothing was achieved. Only the opposing positions were strengthened. Until at a certain point Ruiz Mateos said to Boyer:

–"Give me twenty-four hours and I'll give you a final answer."

–"No. Absolutely not. Now!... or there's nothing to be done," Boyer replied vehemently, of whom his collaborators said that when he made a decision, he was like a wall.

Those close to him say that Ruiz Mateos understood almost nothing. How was it possible that now Boyer was demanding his head and that of his group if ten months earlier, during the UCD government of Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, he had been authorized to buy Fidecaya to save Banco Urquijo from that major economic scandal, the first of the democracy inherited from Francoism, in a deal to be paid over 99 years that had the acquiescence of the Bank of Spain, where Mariano Rubio, Miguel Boyer's great friend and intellectual mentor, was Deputy Governor.

Or how he had also been given the green light months earlier to buy the Galerías Preciados Group, with a large debt owed to the Treasury. "If my group were a ruin, if it was doing so badly, how could the Government and the Bank of Spain have given me permission," he thought to himself before answering Boyer. However, he was hesitant, he did not know what to do. He feared socialist reprisals. His mother, Encarnación Jiménez de Tejada, had already warned him several times.

Finally, Ruiz Mateos flatly refused to accept the agreement that Boyer had offered him on a silver platter. The decision was made after receiving the inflexible advice of his personal advisors, among them, lawyer Alejandro Rebollo Álvarez-Amandi, a man who would later become a trusted confidant of Adolfo Suárez in the Centro Democrático Social (CDS) party, where he was a deputy for Asturias for eight years and spokesperson for the parliamentary group in the Congress of Deputies. Rebollo had been chosen as the intermediary so that Ruiz Mateos could meet with Boyer in a move in which centrist leader Adolfo Suárez had been used as a pretext by the PSOE government. Rebollo was the one who advised Ruiz Mateos not to sign it under any circumstances.

At the time of the expropriation, the lawyers and advisors of the owner of the bee holding were initially the aforementioned Alejandro Rebollo and Fernando Castedo, another man close to Adolfo Suárez in the CDS and who had previously been general director of RTVE. After these two first lawyers, it was the turn of another well-known attorney, the fixer Matías Cortés Domínguez, who later became part of the beautiful people, a figure with great influence in the socialist sectors of "felipismo" and Isabel Preysler's lawyer in her separation process from the Marquess of Griñón. His legal opinion would later serve as the basis for the appeal of unconstitutionality against the Rumasa expropriation law.

Ruiz-Mateos would later accuse all three, mainly Matías Cortés, of being part of the conspiracy plotted against him and his empire by Banco Popular's co-president, Luis Valls Taberner, and the president of the banking employers' association AEB, the Catalan Rafael Termes Carreró, both numeraries of Opus Dei. According to Ruiz Mateos, it was an order issued directly by Opus Dei, which at the time had infiltrators in the upper echelons of monetary and government power.

The agreement was to hand over Rumasa, then a large banking-business group with clear deficiencies and tricks but not many more than other powerful entities of the time, in exchange for not nationalizing the insurance or banking sector by the PSOE. Specifically, this measure saved Banco Popular, linked to Opus Dei, from collapse, as it was going through a dire financial situation at the start of what became the severe banking crisis of the eighties. This measure calmed a public opinion eager for scapegoats after the recent socialist arrival at La Moncloa and also served to set an example of the new socialist conduct in power.

In the midst of the crisis, on February 22, Ruiz Mateos appeared before the media, advised by Opus Dei bankers, who had set him up. It was the first press conference the businessman from Cádiz had ever given. It was an unprecedented challenge to the socialist government, which would hasten the expropriation decision. The owner of Rumasa, accompanied by his lawyers, simply read a statement that, according to his own words, was written entirely by Popular's co-president Luis Valls. In it, he made the public aware of the unprecedented attack his holding and himself were suffering from the socialist government in a premeditated campaign led by Miguel Boyer, a man he barely knew despite the rumors circulating in Madrid that he had worked under him at Rumasa.

Boyer took Ruiz Mateos's words to spread among his party colleagues the feeling of provocation, challenge, and defiance by the owner of the bee holding. Expropriation was already the only way out for Felipe González, who would risk his authority if he gave in to Ruiz Mateos. Almost all ministers, except for a silent Alfonso Guerra (Boyer's staunch enemy), agreed. Among them, Fernando Ledesma (Justice), Enrique Barón (Transport), or Carlos Solchaga (Industry), firm supporters of immediate expropriation and not just a mere government intervention.

In this atmosphere of full tension between Miguel Boyer and the businessman from Cádiz, just minutes before midnight on February 23, 1983, the then spokesman for Felipe González's government, Eduardo Sotillos Polet, appeared on the nightly Telediario on TVE's first channel, interrupting the normal programming, to read an official statement from the socialist government informing the Spanish people of the decision to expropriate Rumasa, Spain's leading private holding whose business volume equaled 1.8 percent of the national GDP.

This is how journalist Sotillos announced it on the small state screen: "The Government, in order to fully guarantee bank deposits, jobs, and the property rights of third parties it considers gravely threatened, has approved a Royal Decree Law expropriating the banks and other companies of the Rumasa group. The reasons for this decision adopted by the Council of Ministers fall squarely within the considerations of public utility and social interest provided for in Article 33.3 of our Constitution. With this measure, State Assets take charge of the entities, thus absolutely ensuring the rights of depositors and employees. The Government has also agreed that from 8 a.m. on Thursday the 24th until 8 a.m. on Monday, February 28, all offices of the Rumasa group banks will remain closed and the trading of the shares of the companies in said group will be suspended until further notice."

That same night, the Minister of the Presidency, Javier Moscoso del Prado from La Rioja, hurriedly acted as messenger and personally took the government decision to the workshops of the Official State Gazette, in Madrid's Chamberí neighborhood, so that it would appear printed in the next day's BOE edition. These urgencies of Felipe González's government caused errors and omissions in the drafting of the Expropriation Decree Law by including in the text published in the BOE companies that did not belong to the holding and omitting others belonging to the hidden or underground Rumasa. José Luis Llorente Bragulat, as Deputy Director General of the advisory services of the Ministry of Justice, was the State Attorney who drafted the draft of the Rumasa Expropriation Decree Law.

Years after the expropriation, the president of the banking employers' association Rafael Termes visited the businessman from Cádiz in what had been his refuge in exile in London for years. There he confided to him:

– "I'm going to tell you something, José María. I'm sorry to tell you now, but to save Banco Popular we had to sacrifice you with the expropriation of Rumasa. The Opus people sold you out to save themselves and had the approval of the Spanish banking establishment, which feared Felipe would go after them. Either we gave him a scapegoat or he'd nationalize us all. We had to choose..."

– "Well, I'm going to tell you something else, Rafael, if Monsignor Escrivá de Balaguer had asked me in his day... I would have given him Rumasa and much more. Whatever he wanted. But I shouldn't have been sacrificed without being told beforehand. If the Opus leaders had asked me, I would have done things right and would have created another alternative Rumasa, and I would have kept a stash of money abroad. Besides, you used Matías Cortes, whom you made my lawyer, to be the mastermind of the whole strategy to strangle Rumasa. He's a real traitor," he replied bitterly.

He managed to move 220 million abroad

Despite the tears in his words, the businessman from Cádiz did manage to move a huge amount of money out of Spain and keep at least seven large companies safe from Miguel Boyer and the socialist government, which were later sold in the following five years with significant capital gains. These were companies located outside Spain. Ruiz Mateos had a dense business network in Europe and America that Boyer had no official knowledge of. A tangle of hidden or shell companies that the man from Cádiz created to shape his business empire outside any established monetary rules and existing economic legislation.

For example, he acquired the second most important winery in Argentina, named Graffigna, which was sold a week before the famous "corralito" to Freixenet for more than 30 million euros; the Everglades Hotel in Miami (USA), sold for 40 million dollars to a Jewish lobby; Union Bank in Frankfurt (Germany), 50 percent owned with BBV, which was the first to be sold in 1983 after the expropriation for 900 million pesetas, and whose president was Ruiz Mateos's maternal nephew, Alfonso Barón Rivero, the person who managed the family's foreign accounts and who had an electronic key that allowed access to accounts in Switzerland; the Rodes firm, the largest bulk wine winery in all of Europe located in Amsterdam (Netherlands), transferred for several million euros; also a beverage chain in the Netherlands, with more than 150 brands, which was sold for 50 million euros; the Da Silva winery, located in Oporto and later bought by Pernod Ricard for 30 million euros; and a large winery in Chile, including vineyards.

In total, it is estimated that the Ruiz Mateos family obtained about 220 million euros from these "B" sales, without Boyer knowing, money that was never deposited in Spain and of which neither the socialist government nor its all-powerful Minister of Economy had any knowledge, unaware of the many actions in the rear by the businessman from Cádiz, who easily evaded the disastrous government controls. It should be remembered that Boyer had not even been in charge of the Economy portfolio for three months, and his people had not yet taken possession of their offices, nor did they know exactly what was happening in the Spanish financial-business sector when he made the bold move to expropriate Rumasa, following the specific orders dictated by his friend Felipe González, who wanted to set a clear example for the economic powers. "Find the reasons to expropriate," he told him. Experts say that the entire expropriation of the bee holding was based on a commemorative report that Rumasa itself had prepared and published for its twentieth anniversary (1961-1981). This was confirmed months later by Miguel Boyer's personal secretary to Ruiz Mateos, to whom she offered her information in exchange for financial help, "since she was going through a very hard time."

In addition, in a building adjacent to the famous towers of Madrid's Plaza de Colón, inspectors found during the search of the offices a 119-page computer printout summarizing the balance sheet and income statement of the holding for the 1982 fiscal year. This information showed that, aside from the multiple parallel accountings the group used depending on the destination of the money or the identity of the person behind it, the accounting reality was very different from that presented in the official reports prepared by Ruiz Mateos.

Thus, days later, it was found that in reality the actual companies were a very insignificant number compared to the hidden or undeclared ones, which doubled that figure. Ruiz Mateos later confessed to having given donations to Opus Dei in undeclared cash worth more than 4 billion pesetas over more than two decades of Rumasa's existence to finance various projects of this ecclesiastical organization abroad.

He blamed Opus Dei for illegally moving money out of Spain. Money that, according to Ruiz Mateos, he delivered and that was taken out in bundles of thousand-peseta bills inside shoeboxes via Andorra, with the collaboration of Valencian journalist and commission agent Antonio Navalón and the intermediary from Elche Diego Selva, both recommended to Ruiz Mateos for the cause by banker Luis Valls. Both were also charged years later in another economic corruption case, known as Argentia Trust, where former Banesto president Mario Conde was sentenced to six years in prison as the main perpetrator.

Miguel Boyer, despite what Ruiz Mateos said, was clear: the technical bankruptcy of the holding was evident. For him, the businessman from Cádiz was a transgressive figure who intended, from the outset, to ignore and violate the rules of the monetary authorities. For Boyer, the expropriation of Rumasa was necessary. At that time, the bee holding practically had a monopoly on opaque money, since it paid its holders interest several points above what other banks offered, reaching 18 percent net in apparently deferred operations that were actually at sight and immediately available.

The business was simple and profitable, but at the same time risky and adventurous, as was later also shown with the promissory notes of Nueva Rumasa. The Sofico and Matesa scandals, financial companies that collapsed spectacularly, still lingered in the official circles of power, where they continued to view with fear the irregular way of operating of some prominent numerary members of Opus Dei, with interests in the business world and, specifically, in the banking sector.

Against the expropriation of Rumasa, the Alianza Popular group (later PP) launched a fierce battle, mainly through its deputy from Badajoz, Luis Ramallo García, who submitted a large number of parliamentary initiatives. Ramallo even asked González's government about the alleged mediation by Isabel Preysler, already romantically involved with Miguel Boyer, in the controversial sale of three companies from the now public holding: the acquisition of the luxury brand Loewe by the French Urvois-Spínola; the sale of the Hotasa hotel chain to the Mallorcan businessman Gabriel Escarrer Julià; and the purchase by the Cisneros family of the Galerías Preciados department stores.

Spanish public opinion reacted critically when the details of the operation became known. The Cisneros family, friends of Felipe González, had made a quick and prosperous business in Spain with the reprivatization of Rumasa, earning many millions from the capital gains of the sale of Galerías. What sparked all the criticism was that the same year as the lucrative sale to the English, Miguel Boyer and his then partner Isabel Preysler accepted an invitation to spend a few days in August aboard the Cisneros family's yacht, sailing the Mediterranean waters of the Balearic Islands.

The photos were distributed in all the magazines and showed the Boyers in great harmony with the Cisneros couple. Days later, rumors about Isabel Preysler's alleged role as an intermediary in the privatization of Galerías Preciados, thanks to her friendship with Venezuelan businessman Gustavo Cisneros, were common knowledge in all Madrid circles. This has always been denied by Preysler.

Since then, the entire process of Rumasa's reprivatization was tainted by serious doubts about impartiality and objectivity. Public opinion never believed Boyer. That's why they decided to create the Advisory Commission for Reprivatization (CAR), established on August 1, 1983, to advise the socialist executive on the most profitable and convenient offers for the public coffers.

Despite Boyer's tireless efforts to keep CAR free from all kinds of government influence, he did not succeed. Legitimacy, impartiality, and independence were completely absent. To this day, there are still major suspicions and controversies regarding the balance of the shady deals, which allowed many businessmen to obtain substantial and million-dollar profits thanks to widespread direct awards. The opposition considered that of the fourteen members of this commission, ten were linked to the socialist administration and that, moreover, some were prominent PSOE members. Public opinion missed the fact that the major unions UGT or CC.OO. were not represented, as they would have been witnesses to the entire reprivatization process. The struggle between Boyer and the unions, later taken to the González government, widened the gap and meant that none of them were included, as they favored Rumasa holding being used to further expand the public sector, something Boyer did not want at any cost. That's why he reprivatized the bee holding in a hurry, creating major gaps and controversies in its reprivatization and severely damaging the credibility of the González government. In this unprecedented race, intermediary companies were even hired, such as First Boston Corporation, which for its work as a broker in the sale of state-owned Rumasa companies earned the not insignificant sum of 1.416 billion pesetas, twenty percent of the 7.985 billion received by the public treasury up to September 1986.

Although Boyer and González wanted most of the Rumasa holding companies to end up in the hands of Spanish businessmen, many of them were acquired by foreign groups. Today, with the passage of years, no one doubts that the reprivatization of Rumasa facilitated speculation and huge windfalls. All of this was strengthened by a careless socialist cabinet, with Miguel Boyer at the helm, who did not want to take responsibility and from which Boyer himself quickly distanced himself, perhaps more concerned with his love affairs with Isabel Preysler.