The oven goes out for the Rubiralta family, but not for Celsa. The Compañía Española de Laminación – born in 1967 – cannot afford to turn it off (it actually has two in Castellbisbal) due to the huge energy costs involved in turning it on. It's electric and that's why Celsa is the third consumer of electricity in all of Spain.
The "men in black" of the creditor funds know this very well after years of rummaging through the bowels of the Catalan company. Union sources have explained that at the end of the week they saw about twenty of these men in black enter the facilities in Castellbisbal.
Although the headquarters have been there 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 in which an administrator was wanted for an "important company" of rolled steel in this municipality.
From there they jumped to the grounds of Castellbisbal. The IESE professor, Pedro Nueno, who advised the two brothers for years, explains how the company started by rolling large pieces of steel with heat. Although Francisco Rubiralta understood very quickly 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 I was looking for what the future of the steel industry would be," says Nueno.
In parallel with the development of the steelworks, José María Rubiralta began to focus on the business of pharmaceutical equipment that gave rise to the current Werfen.
For four decades, the two brothers and the two businesses remained united. It was in 2006 when 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 differences exploded over the purchase of a Finnish company. José María didn't want it, while Francisco did. The company was acquired by another company led by Francesc Rubiralta, the current president.
Whatever the reason for 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. Things of destiny, Werfen remains in the hands of the branch of the family of José María, with a turnover of more than 1.8 billion and is a successful firm, while the Celsa of the branch of Francisco will become part of a group background.
Celsa's shares – once Francisco died in 2010 – passed into the hands of his four sons, although it was Francisco who held the reins of the business. The four will have completely lost their shares once the sentence is executed 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 ownership of the largest family industrial company in Catalonia. The strong corporate investments just before the real estate crisis of 2007 (during the years of the separation of the business) seem to be behind this situation. They were for the improvement of the furnaces and the purchases of plants in some European countries. Today it has 120 production factories in nine countries. The bursting of the bubble and the collapse of construction made it impossible to comply with the loan repayment plan. The covid crisis was the coup de grace to this situation.
But it was also that the big Spanish banks got rid of Celsa's debt and transferred it at a discount to a group of funds. If the debt had continued in the hands of Spanish entities, perhaps we would not have reached the unprecedented situation experienced this week, in which a judge has ruled in 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 that always prioritized austerity 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 day's menu on a tray in the canteen of the steel mill like the rest of the workers. It was at this moment, during lunch, when he took the opportunity to comment on some incident with some of the employees.
A new family company is lost in the hands of funds, without knowing exactly what the new share distribution is. With a turnover of 6,000 million euros, it accumulated debts of 3,000 million. It is so large that if it were part of the Ibex 35 index, the Catalan steel company would be in 16th place by business volume. But this has not been enough to not lose the shares.
