José María Ruiz-Mateos

José María Ruiz–Mateos y Jiménez de Tejada (11 April 1931 – 7 September 2015) was a Spanish businessman, politician, serial fraudster and convicted felon.

He began by exporting wine to England. He founded the conglomerate Rumasa and had a lot of 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.[1] 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 [2]. He also founded a new holding company, New Rumasa (16,000 employees). There have been multiple and various court rulings on the Rumasa case both in Spain and outside Spain, and both the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court have spoken on numerous judgments. Ruíz Mateos was acquitted in 1999 by the Spanish Supreme Court [3].

He was a well-known member of Opus Dei, though he was expelled from the group in 1986.

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