How Algerian billionaire Issad Rebrab's $400 million steelworks gamble in Italy collapsed and took his Brazil iron ore dream down with it

Issad Rebrab had a plan to make Cevital a global industrial force, not just Algeria's biggest private company. Between 2015 and 2018, he staked that ambition on 2 projects: a failing steelworks in Piombino, Italy and a giant iron ore complex deep in Brazil's Para state. Neither one survived. Together, they represent the most expensive failed bet in Algerian corporate history, and the story of why they collapsed says as much about Algeria's financial system as it does about Rebrab himself, Vipresse reported April 23.

The Italian chapter started in June 2015, when Cevital acquired the Lucchini steelworks at Piombino for EUR 10 million. Piombino is Italy's second-largest steel hub, and Lucchini had been struggling badly under its previous owners. Rebrab's price was almost laughably low for what he was getting: an operational heavy-industry site in a strategic port location with existing infrastructure and a workforce of 750 people.

The plan was to spend EUR 400 million transforming the plant. Cevital would modernise the blast furnaces, restart production of special steel, expand the workforce to nearly 2,000 and turn Piombino into a European industrial base that could serve North African and international markets. Rebrab named the acquired entity Aferpi and was named Personality of the Year by Italy's Tuscany region in 2016 as local officials celebrated the arrival of foreign investment into a struggling industrial city.

None of it materialised in the way he described.

The blast furnaces were not restarted quickly. The funds needed to begin the transformation were blocked or delayed. Italian press coverage began reporting uncertainty and slippage. What should have been a momentum story turned into a waiting story, then a question mark. In 2018, Cevital sold Piombino to JSW Steel, the Indian steelmaker. The Algerian experiment in European heavy industry was over.

What happened behind the scenes

Part of what went wrong was financial. The Bank of Algeria has historically restricted foreign currency transfers, and the EUR 400 million required to execute Rebrab's Piombino plan was far beyond what the central bank would comfortably allow to leave Algeria. The funds that did move were slow, and the funds that needed to follow were either blocked or came with conditions that made the timeline unworkable.

The political dimension compounded the financial one. Algeria under President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal was not an uncomplicated operating environment for private entrepreneurs, and Rebrab's relationship with the establishment was never simple. Reports of friction between Rebrab and the Bouteflika regime circulated throughout this period. Permits and authorisations from the Algerian side were delayed. The combination of a reluctant central bank and a government that was not fully behind the project made it nearly impossible to deliver on the scale the project needed.

Brazil: built on Italy's foundation

The Brazil plan was announced in 2016 and never recovered from Italy's failure, though few people understood that connection at the time.

Cevital had been importing raw sugar from Brazilian ports for decades, shipping it to its refinery at Bejaia on the Algerian coast. That commercial relationship had given the company contacts and knowledge of the country's industrial logistics. In 2016, Rebrab signed an agreement with Vale, Brazil's dominant mining group, to establish an integrated steel complex at Maraba in the state of Para. The planned output was 2.7 million tonnes of steel per year, supplied by 4.5 million tonnes of iron ore from Vale's nearby operations.

The project was presented to Brazilian President Michel Temer. Local officials in Para attended presentation meetings. The paperwork and scale models existed. The site had been chosen. On paper, Maraba looked like a serious, advanced-stage project.

In reality, it depended entirely on Piombino.

The logic of the Brazil plan was that ore extracted in Para would be processed at Piombino, creating a vertically integrated supply chain between a Brazilian mining operation and a European steelworks. Rebrab had described this explicitly when presenting the project. Once JSW Steel bought Piombino in 2018, the downstream processing capacity that Brazil needed no longer belonged to Cevital. Without a steelworks to receive the ore, mining it in Brazil made no economic sense. The Maraba project died without ever breaking ground.

Rebrab's legal troubles and Cevital's retreat

The collapse of the international projects was followed almost immediately by a much more personal crisis. In April 2019, Rebrab was arrested as part of a Algerian government corruption sweep that took in 5 prominent businessmen. The charges against him included importing used machinery while claiming tax and customs breaks reserved for new equipment purchases. He was sentenced to 6 months and held for longer than that before being released on January 1, 2020. He was also fined approximately 1.383 billion dinars, equivalent to roughly $11.6 million at the time.

The conviction added a legal dimension to what had already been a difficult stretch. In May 2023, he was arrested a second time over what the authorities described as questionable financial transactions involving Cevital and foreign entities. An Algerian court subsequently barred him from exercising any commercial or management role within the group.

Rebrab had already handed day-to-day leadership to his son Malik in July 2022. Cevital is now run by the second generation of the family, and the group has retreated to what it does well domestically: food processing, sugar refining, glass, automotive and distribution across Algeria. At the international level, the company's activity has been minimal since the Piombino exit.

Who Rebrab is

Issad Rebrab, now 81, was born in 1944 in the Kabylie village of Taguemount-Azouz, the son of an Algerian independence fighter. He studied accounting on scholarship in France, returned to Algeria, taught commercial law, then entered business through an accounting firm before acquiring a stake in a metallurgical construction company in 1971. He built and lost his first industrial operations when they were destroyed in a terrorist attack in 1995. He left Algeria, regrouped in France, and came back in 1997 to build Cevital.

At his peak Forbes estimated his net worth at $3.7 billion, making him Algeria's only billionaire on the global list and one of the continent's wealthiest individuals. That figure has declined significantly since his legal difficulties and the write-offs associated with the failed international projects. Current estimates put his wealth at approximately $2.5 billion.

The Piombino purchase cost EUR 10 million. The planned investment was EUR 400 million. The actual amount spent before the sale to JSW is not publicly disclosed. The Brazil project cost planning fees, feasibility studies and administrative expenses but never required construction capital because it never reached that stage. What both projects cost in opportunity, management time and credibility is harder to put a number on.

Cevital built itself into an Algerian giant. Rebrab spent three years trying to prove it could become something more. The attempt failed, and understanding why it failed tells the story of what it costs to build internationally from inside a country whose financial system is not designed to let capital move freely.