He began by exporting wine to England. As the son of a small sherry producer, he managed to sign a monster contract in 1964, becoming the exclusive supplier to
John Harvey & Sons. As this required more sherry wine than his family bodega could supply, he started buying other wineries. At the heart of his wine group was the company Bodegas Internacionales. He founded the conglomerate
Rumasa (Ruiz Mateos Sociedad Anónima) and had considerable influence in Spanish society. The group included several banks, hotels, wineries, supermarkets and luxury stores, insurance companies, construction firms... 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 lost in court. He was imprisoned on charges of currency smuggling, fraud and tax evasion. 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 and consequently achieved the judicial immunity that he was looking for. He also founded a new holding company, New Rumasa, with 16,000 employees. There have been multiple and various court rulings on the Rumasa case both in Spain and outside Spain; the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court have both spoken on numerous judgments. Ruíz Mateos was acquitted in 1999 by the
Spanish Supreme Court. He was a well-known member of
Opus Dei, though he was expelled from the group in 1986. Ruíz Mateos was the father of 13 sons and daughters. On 17 February 2011 the ten largest companies within the Nueva Rumasa group were declared in default and unable to make payments to their creditors after the Spanish Social Security, Royal Bank of Scotland and others requested that liens be placed on the companies' assets, nearly twenty-eight years to the day on which his original holding company, Rumasa, was
expropriated by the Spanish government. ==Foundation Ruiz Mateos==