The oven turns off for the Rubiralta family but not for Celsa. The Spanish Lamination Company – founded in 1967 – cannot afford to turn it off (it actually has two in Castellbisbal) due to the enormous energy costs of turning it on. It is electric and that is why Celsa is the third largest consumer of electricity in all of Spain.
The “men in black” of the creditor funds know this very well after years of scrutinizing the guts of the Catalan company. Union sources explained that at the end of the week they saw around twenty of those men in black enter the facilities in Castellbisbal.
Although that is where the headquarters have been for much of the time, in reality Francisco Rubirata and his brother Jose María founded Celsa in Sant Andreu de la Barca. In January 1967, an advertisement appeared in the pages of La Vanguardia seeking administration for an “important steel rolling company” in that municipality.
From there they jumped to the Castellbisbal grounds. IESE professor Pedro Nueno, who advised the two brothers for years, explains how the company began by heat rolling large pieces of steel. Although Francisco Rubiralta quickly understood the need to have a furnace with which to melt the scrap metal and turn it into steel. He was one of the pioneers of the circular economy that is now so fashionable. “I met Francisco Rubiralta at Harvard because he was looking for what the future of the steel mill would be,” says Nueno.
Parallel to the development of the steel mill, José María Rubiralta began to focus on the pharmaceutical equipment business that would give rise to the current Werfen.
For four decades, the two brothers and the two businesses stuck together. It was in 2006 when the disagreements between the two led to the breakup. It was then that the current president Francesc Rubiralta, son of Francisco and nephew of José María, also appeared in the press. The disagreements exploded over the purchase of a Finnish company. José María did not want to while Francisco did. That company was acquired by another company led by Francesc Rubiralta, the current president.
Whatever caused the breakup, the truth is that the company split in two and Francisco had to compensate his brother since Celsa was more valuable than Werfen. As fate would have it, Werfen remains in the hands of José María’s branch of the family with a turnover of more than 1.8 billion and is a successful firm while Celsa of Francisco’s branch will become part of a group of funds.
Celsa’s shares –once Francisco died in 2010– passed into the hands of his four children, although it was Francesc who was in charge of the business. The four will have completely lost their shares once the sentence is carried out and as long as the Council of Ministers gives its approval.
It is not easy to find the “original sin” that has led to the loss of the shares of the largest family industrial company in Catalonia. The heavy investments made just before the real estate crisis of 2007 (in the years of the separation of the business) seem to be behind this situation. They were for the improvement of furnaces and plant purchases in some European countries. Today it has 120 production factories in nine countries. The bursting of the bubble and the collapse of construction prevented the plan to return the loans from being fulfilled. The covid crisis was the final straw in this situation.
But it was also the case that the big Spanish banks got rid of Celsa’s debt and transferred it at a discount to a group of funds. Perhaps if the debt had remained in the hands of Spanish entities, the unprecedented situation experienced this week would not have been reached, in which a judge has issued a judgment without the possibility of appeal that the family’s shares be transferred to the funds because the Debts exceed the value of the company.
A management in which austerity always prevailed will be left behind, as some of the family’s collaborators remember. That spirit was also inherited by the current president who usually ate the daily menu on a tray in the steel mill canteen like the rest of the workers. It was at that moment, during the meal, when he took the opportunity with some of his employees to discuss some incident.
A new family business is lost to funds without knowing exactly what the new share distribution is. With a turnover of 6,000 million euros, it accumulated debts of 3,000. It is such a size that if it were part of the Ibex 35 index, the Catalan steel company would be ranked 16th by business volume. It has not been enough to avoid losing the shares.
