After more than two decades truthful and living in the Port of the Jungle (Girona), and when they were already in retirement age, José Andrés Bel, a renowned economist and his wife, Adela Esteban, undertook a last business adventure. In a very short time, as of 2018, they began to manage one. They did it with hardly any experience in the sector and through economic operations with which they solved the situation of many business owners who wanted to retire. In addition, with very prolonged openings of the establishments, they boosted the winters of this municipality of the Costa Brava that previously hung the “closed” poster after the tourist season.
And he left a trail of pain in the population, both for the tragic of deaths and for the delicate situation in which there are a hundred employees, who have seen closing businesses in a precipitous way. The effects on the town multiply: owners of floors that have lost their tenants and about twenty investors who have seen the opportunity to recover the money they put in the restaurants vanished. The real amount that may have lost will hardly come to light.
José Andrés Bel, “Pepito” and Adela Esteban Galindo, were originally from Santa Eulalia del Campo (Teruel). His family moved to Barcelona. He was born there, studied baccalaureate at the Salesians of Sarrià and in 1979 he graduated in Economic Sciences from the University of Barcelona. They married, stayed to live in the Catalan capital and had a daughter.
José Andrés was more than 13 years in the MR Amat SA group, of which he was general director between 1985 and 1994, when he became the operational general director of Stradivariuswas a decade in which he helped the creation of the company and later for sale to the group Inditex. Between 2004 and 2011 he assumed the General Directorate of the Bag and Complement Company Seeks And the next three years went on to direct the well -known shoe company of Banyoles (Girona) Castañer. Since 2016 until today he was a business and investment consultant. She, according to her acquaintances, never worked out of home.
This expert in business management, restructuring, and expansion of business projects and his wife arrived at the Port of the jungle to spend. They fell in love with the town, in the Natural Park of Cap de Creus, on the Costa Brava, a green environment with crystalline water coves. The first years rented a floor and went on weekends, but soon bought a house not too large and reformed it to their liking. At the beginning they spent weekends and holidays, until they began establishing friendship with both neighbors and Barcelona who had breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays at Café España (now CA La María) and set their residence in the population. “They were totally integrated into the town, they had a lot of social life,” says one of their friends.
According to their friends, they were a “peculiar couple.” He was “mystical, spoke soft, slow.” She quite the opposite. They define her as “a strong woman who always told you what he thought, if you liked it well and, if not, too.” “Come on, that at the same dinner I could send you several times to hell,” they detail. There are also those who defend that “they were very good people, very correct,” convinced that “they did not want to harm anyone.” This blocks a phrase that his surroundings attributes José Andrés the night before trying to take their lives: “I would know very bad that the people of the town laugh at my failure.” A good friend of the couple assures that he was a man “with a lot of ego”, but also considers him unable to harm anyone and always convinced that businesses would prosper. “It was wrong with dimension,” he laments.
Everything changed when Pepito retired, in 2018. The first step he took was to rent the restaurant Ca l’Aminda and the breeze (formerly the owner) whose owner, his friend, retired. Then it was the turn of Cafè de la Marina, Ca la Maria (formerly Café Spain) and so on until reaching the dozen premises. The senior rents paid, normally twice what the market requested, were very well received by the owners of the business that leased. To compete for the beach baring, they won their competitors offering 35,000 or 40,000 euros where the others put 12,000. But the biggest bet of marriage was the Brazcó restaurant.
In 2020 they bought El Brascó, near the Port of the Jungle, on the road of the Selva de Mar, in the small town of Selva de Mar, about 220 inhabitants. This was the only acquisition that the couple made, and converted the restaurant, which already had a swimming pool, in a very busy complex that was open all year with tennis, paddle tennis, futbite and gymn and a gym. The quota was module 25 euros per month. “You could go to its terraces all year, in winter it offered oysters to a euro,” recalls a neighbor. However, according to some sources, this is the business that caused more economic grievances, because it had local investors.
The fall in the quality of the service that was offered in the premises and the rumors that the couple was asking for very important sums of money to possible investors, all the alarms in the town turned months ago.
After the suicide of the couple, 71 and 68, the new sole administrator of the restaurant society, with 51%, is TQ Mr Family II, who so far was the investment partner. In a statement sent to this newspaper, he says they are analyzing the company’s situation and viability. They have pledged to act with the maximum responsibility and business rigor to give the best possible solution and maintain that “they work quickly and diligence to minimize any damage and so that all affected people can recover normality as soon as possible.” However, he warns that “it presents a complex situation for costs and indebtedness.” According to the statement, the workers of the nine premises of the Corvaill of Port SL are aware of payment.
Although some friends warned him and that there were many people who believed that these businesses could not end well, nobody expected this fatal outcome. The second deputy mayor and mayor, Roger Pinart, asks not to speculate the tragic deaths of the couple. Officially, at this time the Mossos d’Esquadra have no open investigation.
People with suicidal thoughts and their relatives can seek help by calling 024, a line of attention from the Ministry of Health.
