Ricardo Salinas Pliego has been boasting for years about the performance of his legal team, of which he has left traces on his profile on social networks. “To avoid taxes there are accountants, to defend ourselves there are lawyers”, writes the Mexican entrepreneur in an article on These are not the only messages and users bring them out with irony this week, which ends with a historic judicial failure for the fifth richest man in Mexico.
The tycoon owed the treasury more than 36 billion pesos for more than 10 years, a sum that the state has since been unable to collect from him, partly due to his legal strategy. However, since the new Supreme Court ministers took office just under three months ago, public powers have been used to the maximum to unblock them. Now he will have to pay out almost 50 billion due to the delay in a payment that became inevitable after the ruling of the Supreme Court, the last judicial instance.
It was a via crucis of years in which the work of the lawyers was more than testimonial. “What he was looking for was that, at a certain point, the debt could expire or be forgiven, to find a way not to pay. Until a few years ago in Mexico there was the cancellation of tax credits. I think he was looking for this. The legal strategy was to wait for a favorable scenario”, says Jaime Cárdenas, a jurist at UNAM. Part of this tactic has been to flood the courts with complaints for years.
The cases that Salinas Pliego had opened before the Supreme Court date back to the fiscal years from 2008 to 2013. The subsequent appeals in the various instances, as well as the numerous trials that arose in each of them, had managed to postpone indefinitely the collection of the debts which were finally validated in each judicial phase. As of this week, the Supreme Court was considering nine Salinas Group injunctions that had generated 101 subissues. Some of them were Treasury appeals against the admission of these protections, but the vast majority referred to dossiers opened by the business conglomerate, which the government accuses of exploiting these delaying techniques.
Of the nine main cases, the High Court initiated seven on Thursday, representing the majority of the sum, and reserved resolution of the remaining two for next Wednesday, which amount to just over 700 million pesos in total, a much smaller percentage. This will then put an end to a judicial battle for which the efforts of the three powers were necessary, more or less coordinated by the party in power, Morena, which is tightening the siege on the large debtors and above all on this one, of greater symbolic dimension.
The push from the three powers bore fruit less than three months after the laying of the first stone, on 1 September, with the oath of the ministers of the Court. The judges at the polls had the last word in a process that the previous plenary session had dragged on without specifying a day for its conclusion. The files came out of the drawer shortly after the High Court took up its new addition, but by enough margin for the Legislature to approve the amparo appeal reform in mid-October, which now makes it difficult for Salinas Pliego to impede debt collection enforcement. The new rules significantly limit the appeal when a debt is definitive, as in this case, and impose deadlines so that the processes do not gather dust on some official’s desk again.
The firmness of the tax service, linked to the Treasury Ministry, in not compromising with the tycoon’s attempts to negotiate debts, completes the list that made this week’s result possible, which marks a before and after and sends a very clear message to anyone trying to repeat the strategy of the Salinas Group. “You will have no response from SAT because of the way it is used to arguing, presenting resources to stop collection and prolong legal proceedings,” tax attorney Grisel Galeano had harshly warned two weeks ago, when the end was imminent. The Supreme Court resolutions, which validate the work of the collegiate courts, represent a severe blow for the owner of a business conglomerate whose wealth is valued, at the current exchange rate, at 7,440 million dollars, approximately 136,000 million pesos, according to the list drawn up by Bloomberg.
Next week the Constitutional Court will finish resolving the pending tax issues with the millionaire, but the game is not over. The Executive has stated on several occasions that the debts with SAT amount to approximately 75,000 million pesos. Some of them have not yet reached the Court and it will be the Court itself that will once again define the judicial future of the entrepreneur, who sometimes plays to oppose the Government directly from the political scene.
The flirtation with this idea has strengthened at several moments in recent months, such as in the mass bath the businessman took on his 70th birthday. In an escalation this week, in which his company Elektra was risking its future in court, Salinas Pliego traveled to El Salvador to meet Nayib Bukele, the president, who was under intense questioning by human rights defenders. “If I were the president of Mexico, my government’s number one priority would be the same as yours: declaring war on criminals,” he later shared, along the same lines as other comments about a hypothetical presidency he has shown online in this period.
The multiple fronts of the entrepreneur
The future of Salinas Pliego is not defined only in these lawsuits or in the national courts. Two days before the Court’s attack, the Treasury blocked 13 casinos for alleged money laundering and links to organized crime. Two were his: Ganador Azteca and Operadora Ganadora Tv Azteca. Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, in a New York court, the tycoon is arguing over another millionaire debt, this time with his American creditors, who are asking him for 400 million dollars. As in the case of the lawsuits with SAT, the delay in payments raised the figure to 580 million dollars, about 10.6 billion pesos, at current exchange rates.
This process is progressing at a rapid pace and has already resulted in a victory for the opponents in Mexico, who managed to convince a federal judge to revoke a precautionary measure granted by another judge in Mexico City. This latest decision revoked the protection that allowed the broadcaster to avoid its financial responsibilities on the grounds that Covid was a cause of force majeure for failure to comply with them. The New York court ordered him to desist from taking legal action in the neighboring country, but in a letter submitted this week by his creditors, they said TV Azteca had not given up its efforts and had stopped short of disclosing in a writing that its challenge to that ban had already been rejected by the courts.
The latest setback in the long list arrived this Friday from the other side of the Atlantic. Salinas Pliego’s team hired intelligence firm Black Cube to spy on his opponent and gather evidence that would help him win a case without going to trial, as revealed Bloomberg. The London judge, however, ruled that the tactic was unethical and ordered the litigation to continue in court. For the moment, no front offers any victory to the entrepreneur.
