The lawsuit of more than €500 million by the new owners of Celsa against Francesc Rubiralta has been dismissed.

BarcelonaAnother chapter in the Celsa case is coming to an end. Although Barcelona Commercial Court 2 will hear the case in September 2023, decided to hand over Celsa to some creditor funds, who had presented a restructuring plan to become the new owners of the company after accumulating billions of dollars in debt for years, the new management, now with the company under its arm, decided to take it to court again who had been its president until then, Francisco Rubiralta. He did so almost a year later, in mid-2024, in the case of a corporate liability action against him for loans worth €469 million granted to family holding companies that were already uncollectible because these companies were in bankruptcy proceedings. Now, Barcelona's Commercial Court No. 5 has ruled in favor of Rubiralta: it considers it proven that the loan was uncollectible and was known to be uncollectible by both the plaintiff company and its partners, debtors, and financial creditors.

The lawsuit, filed by Celsa's owner, Inversiones Pico Espadas, focused on a €469 million loan—which the lawsuit claimed was €504 million—that originated in a series of transactions carried out by several Celsa group companies during the 1920s. This loan was also taken into account in the group's various refinancing processes in 2010, 2013, and 2017, but was never claimed. Years later, in the approval process for the restructuring plan promoted by foreign funds in 2023, the technical valuation reports did not take it into account.

However, Inversiones Pico Espadas considered that Rubiralta had committed an unlawful omission by not agreeing to the maturity date or requesting the claim for the intragroup credit during the 2020, 2021, and 2022 financial years, when this credit, according to them, was payable and relevant to financial assets. This opinion has now been declared erroneous by the court: "The claim for the credit was not only inappropriate in the economic, financial, and legal context of the Celsa group, but would also have harmed the company's interests and those of the common shareholders," the judge concluded, dismissing the claim because the elements constituting the required relationship were not met—leading to unlawful action.