February 23 will mark 29 years of the expropriation of Rumasa on the part of Felipe González' government. The Ruiz-Mateos family conglomerate, then owned by several banks, registered significant debt with the Ministry of the Economy and Ministry of Social Security and put the financial system at risk. Yesterday, nearly three decades later, history has repeated itself.
A judge from the Audiencia Nacional Pablo Ruz ordered a seizure of all the Ruiz-Mateos' family assets in order to account for the family's debt, which totals more than 1.5 billion euros. The debt is spread out among the Spanish government, commercial creditors and investors that bought the family's promissory notes.
The assets comprise 220 homes and lots, various luxury cars and at least a hundred valuable works of art. Sources close to the investigation have confirmed that in addition to putting several paintings on sale (the auction house Ansorena has suspended sales for now), the Ruiz-Mateos family has been trying to sell the bulk of their real estate properties estimated at over 250 million euros in order to avoid asset seizures and move money outside of Spain.
Sources also confirm that the person responsible for carrying out the deals is one of the family front men, Luis María Sanz. The court order was issued after 50 officers of the national Unit of Financial and Tax Fraud (UDEF following the Spanish abbreviation) performed at least seven examinations of the family's properties this past Wednesday, among them their estate in the luxury Somosaguas neighborhood of Madrid. For now, neither the Ruiz-Mateos couple nor none of their thirteen children are being forced to vacate their homes. They will likely remain there until an evacuation order and subsequent sell-off by the state.
