2023-07-11 15:34:41
The trial that will settle Celsa’s future has ended. The head of the commercial court number two of Barcelona has settled a week of views plus another day of conclusions with the traditional “view for sentencing”. If the control of the steelworkswhich employs 10.000 personas in Spain and bills 6,000 million euros per year, remains in the hands of the Rubiralta family or it passes to your creditors, it only depends now on the court ruling that is issued between September 1 and 8. A decision to face or cross, because on the sentence there is no appeal and your verdict will be final.
During the morning of this Tuesday, the parties have synthesized the divergences that they exhibited during the past week. The defense of the Rubiralta has tried to convince the judge to dismiss the complaint of the creditor funds and that the viability of the group depends on maintaining control of it. While the plaintiff funds -SVP Global, Deutschebank, Sculptor and Anchorage- have argued the opposite, that the viability plan defended by the Rubiraltas are castles in the air, which condemn the group to present and future insolvency and that, among other things, They start from a debt relief that they are not going to accept.
After the “seen for sentencing” several scenarios are opened. On the one hand, it is possible that the judge rules in favor of the Rubiraltas and dismisses the bankruptcy. This would not make the debt that this family of Catalan industrialists maintain with various funds disappear. Both the already expired and the one that will expire in the future. And Celsa’s current management should make decisions to generate enough cash to meet them, either by renegotiating the debt -something that the funds have said they do not intend-, generating new income -through possible future sales, for example- or cutting expenses .
The other possible scenario is that the judge rules in favor of the funds and they become the property of the company. This would separate the Rubiraltas and force the funds to name a new board of directors to run the day-to-day running of the company. A list of names that, as they stated during the trial, have not yet tied up.
Although, in this scenario, the future of the Catalan steel giant not only depends on the decision of the judge, but also of the Government. And it is that while Celsa is a company classified as “strategic“, any operation that implies its change of ownership and address must have the approval of the Executive. A Government that, by the time the sentence comes out, will already be in office.
And, in the event that the Executive end up authorizing the transfer, all of Celsa’s debt would not be canceled and there would be creditors who would continue to demand payments. Something that the new property should attend to, whether it be generating new income -which during the trial they have defended that it is complicated- or selling part of the business -although they have also defended their intention of not touching the current industrial model of Celsa-.
version clash
The Rubiraltas have appealed to the judge to dismiss the lawsuit by legal means, considering that there is no place to demand the debt swap for shares of the industrial group, while the Rubiraltas are opposed and this would be more similar to a “expropriation“. As well as by way of facts, discrediting the reports presented in recent days, alleging that the funds have priced the value of Celsa downward in order to keep the company at a bargain price. Well, if the debt is higher to the value of the company, the bankruptcy law allows creditors to collect the outstanding shares.
According to their numbers, the funds have invested less than 250 million to obtain a debt of 1,200 million euros from the banks that initially lent the Rubiralta money. And based on said disbursement of already expired credit, they want shares worth 4,000 million euros to be delivered to them. “They are not interested and have never been interested in resolving the situation. […] They intend to take advantage of a more or less transitory moment to expropriate the partners and keep more than what is rightfully theirs”, has defended the current ownership of Celsa.
The creditor funds, for their part, have tried to bury any option for Celsa’s future viability under the leadership of the Rubiralta, whose solvency they distrust. Since this would happen, immediately, through the loan of €550 million authorized by the government. Of these, 400 million went directly to pay outstanding loans. “They propose a viable alternative that turns out to be pure smoke, a chimera”, since its authorization depends on “a reduction that the creditors are not willing to accept”, according to the defense lawyer of the funds. “We don’t even know if the QUIET It’s still there,” he added.
Along these lines, the funds insist on collecting the debt via capital because they rule out that Celsa’s business will do well enough in the coming years to generate sufficient surpluses for it. The creditors plaintiffs They have accused the Rubiraltas of not presenting the results for the first two quarters of 2023, since these could fuel their doubts about the lack of future viability. And they would confirm that the data for the 2022 financial year, which were record, would be an exception and not the trend for the coming years.
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