Claudia Sheinbaum’s government achieved a historic victory in court last Thursday. The Supreme Court dismissed seven of the nine cases that the entrepreneur Ricardo Salinas Pliego had opened against the Tax Service (SAT) in the High Court and all were in favor of the public body. Although the precise amount is yet to be defined, the Mexican tycoon initially risked almost 36 billion pesos, which increased due to delays in payments to almost 50 billion. “All the welfare programs for Michoacán amount to about 30,000, these are very significant amounts,” the president compared Friday in her morning conference, when asked by a journalist who asked for an equivalence to give some perspective.
The president supported the decisions of the Court, which limited itself to rejecting the Salinas Group’s review appeals or upholding the appeals filed against them by the Treasury Ministry. This means that it did not go into the merits of the issues, but validated the actions of the previous instance, which in all cases issued sentences contrary to the interests of the entrepreneur. “It is not strange that they resolved this way because they had already gone through several cases, some of them before 2018. It is justice, as simple as that,” said the president, who categorically rejected the businessman’s accusations of a “false and politicized” court. “It’s a resolution that has to do with our justice system, it’s not about slogans,” he responded.
The tax credits that became final this Thursday correspond to years between 2008 and 2013. The entrepreneur had to contest them first before the tax authority, Sheinbaum listed, then before the Court of Administrative Justice and finally before the collegiate courts before reaching the Supreme Court, which rejected them because they did not have a constitutional interest or raised new, unprecedented questions. In all cases, Salinas Pliego lost, having already exhausted national avenues to prevail over the Treasury’s version.
It has been a multi-year process that culminated this week in the rush that the new Supreme Court took, coming out of the polls, to resolve a handful of cases of vital importance to the government, both practically and symbolically, that had been stuck “in a drawer,” in the president’s words. “They arrived at that moment at the Court and the Court left them frozen, it did not want to decide. It is not even that it had decided against or for. They arrive, it admits them and then freezes them”, he complained.
Minister Lenia Batres herself praised the day before the difference between the current Constitutional Court, elected by popular vote, and the previous one. “These kinds of resolutions are possible now. Before, without legal justification, more than one natural or moral person was forgiven or deducted or exempted, as if we ministers were tax authorities. And we are not,” he wrote.
Doubts, however, persist in some sectors every time a resolution favorable to the interests of the Executive is issued, since the new judges come from the accordions distributed by the party in power, Morena. In this case the issue was very topical. The president must raise revenue to support his social programs without resorting to tax reform. To get around the problem it is closing the holes from which the money that should enter the public coffers escapes. There are two billion pesos stuck in the courts over disputed tax credits. Salinas Pliego is the tip of the iceberg.
