The Spanish entrepreneur José Luis Ruiz-Mateos, has been accused by National Court Judge Pablo Ruz of paying the mortgages on his properties with the money from his investors.

The judge says the family used the funds from IOU’s given the Nueva Rumasa group to cover the cost of their ‘high lifestyle’.

The revelation comes with the partial lifting of reporting restrictions in the case as investigations into Nueva Rumasa continues with documents on companies in the group located in Belize, Netherlands Antilles, Virgin Islands, Panama, Switzerland, Holland, USA, Andorra and Chile.

The judge thinks the Bardajera company acted as manager of the single official accounts and received 673 million € from the rest of the companies in the group, ‘a large part of which came from investors who took on IOU’s’. This was structured in a pyramid way, and while new money kept arriving there was no problem.:Text may be subject to copyright.This blog does not claim copyright to any such text. Copyright remains with the original copyright holder.

The court statement says that part of this money was used by Ruiz-Mateos to be distributed as cash injections to couples in trouble in the group.

Nueva Rumasa is thought to have accumulated debts of 1.5 billion.