The Company That Promised Europe's Largest Cannabis Plantation at Beja Grew Nothing and Left 8.5 Million Euros of Debt
The insolvency administrator and the Ministerio Publico both argue that Symtomax's collapse should be qualified as culpable, naming its British and Dutch managers. Its assets raised less than 4 percent of what the company owed the state alone.
Symtomax arrived in Portugal promising the largest outdoor medicinal cannabis plantation in Europe, on land at Beja. It never grew anything. The company is now insolvent with debts of 8.5 million euros, part of it owed to the Portuguese state, and its assets have been auctioned for less than 4 percent of the state's claim alone.
The insolvency administrator, Raul Gonzalez Benito, has filed an opinion arguing that the insolvency should be qualified as culposa, or culpable, "grave fault being presumed", and that the qualification should attach to the company's two managers: the British national Paul Nathan Segal and the Dutch national Olaf Van Tulder. The Ministério Público has taken the same position. Jornal de Negócios reported both filings on Thursday.
What a culpable qualification would mean
Portuguese insolvency law separates the collapse of a company from the conduct of the people who ran it. Under the Código da Insolvência e da Recuperação de Empresas, a court hearing the incidente de qualificação can declare an insolvency fortuita, in which case nobody is personally affected, or culposa, in which case it names the people responsible.
The consequences of the second finding are personal and long. Those named can be barred for between two and ten years from administering other people's assets and from holding company office or trading, lose any claims they held against the estate, and be ordered to compensate creditors up to the value of the credits left unpaid. No court has ruled yet: the administrator's opinion and the prosecutors' position are arguments the judge will weigh, and the two managers can contest them.
How much was promised
The scale of the original announcement is what makes the arithmetic uncomfortable. In October 2019 the company presented Eurico Castro Alves, a former president of Infarmed who had also served a month as Secretary of State for Health in the second Passos Coelho government, as a non-executive director. The project was pitched as Europe's biggest open-air medicinal cannabis cultivation site, in a district that had been positioning itself for exactly that kind of investment.
Cultivation of cannabis for medical use in Portugal requires an Infarmed licence, and Infarmed publishes the list of authorised operators. Symtomax never reached production. What remained at the end was a set of assets that raised, at auction, a fraction of a single creditor's claim.
The failure sits oddly against the sector's actual numbers. Portugal is one of Europe's larger exporters of medicinal cannabis, and the volumes have been rising sharply. The Beja case is not a story about demand, but about a company that raised expectations locally and delivered a hole in the books.
What this means for expats
- The industry is real, this company was not: Portugal exported 66 tonnes of medicinal cannabis in six months, almost matching the whole of the previous year.
- Company directors carry personal exposure here: a culpable qualification can disqualify a manager from running a business in Portugal for up to ten years, which is worth knowing before you accept a board seat.
- It is part of a pattern: foreign-owned projects have collapsed the same way, including the British owner of Portugal's largest solar plant at Alcoutim.
- The state rarely recovers much: a bankrupt Alentejo marble firm drew no bidder at all, and the state wrote off a 2 million euro stake.
- Workers are usually last in line: when a Gaia shoe factory founded in 1948 went under, 54 staff were left without their July wages.
