The debts that Ricardo Salinas Pliego had acquired from the Treasury have a final amount, the only element that remained to be established for the process to enter the final phase, that of execution. After the setback he suffered on November 13 before the Supreme Court, which ruled against him in seven trials, the Mexican businessman will now have to face a final payment of 51 billion pesos, as announced by the director of the Tax Service (SAT), Antonio Martínez Dagnino, this Friday morning during the morning conference of the president, Claudia Sheinbaum. The SAT official clarified that the requirement will be notified next January. The debts date back to fiscal years between 2008 and 2013 and initially amounted to 35,873 million pesos, but delays added surcharges until reaching the millionaire figure of 51,000 million. If Salinas Pliego decides to pay voluntarily, however, it can request adjustments of up to 39%.
“I hope he pays,” the president said this morning, reiterating that this is a legal question and not a political one, the other front where the government fights daily with the fifth richest man in Mexico. However, the announcement from the Tax Service, expected since the historic ruling of the Constitutional Court, comes one day after the tycoon’s visit to the White House to attend the dinner organized by US President Donald Trump. “We pay and that’s it, what else? Their story is running out,” Salinas Pliego expressed on his social networks after the Executive made public the final amount. After this last hard blow, the millionaire finds himself practically without the possibility of continuing to avoid the payment of debts, the delay in which in some cases reaches 17 years.
Asked by a journalist about the destination of this money, the president cited as a reference the social pension for women, which will have a budget of 59 billion next year, and spoke of an “increase in scholarships”. “This will be useful to the people,” he summarized, refusing to comment on the businessman’s visit to this northern country.
The political level is a slippery slope for Sheinbaum when it comes to Salinas Pliego. The tycoon capitalized on the protests of the self-proclaimed Generation Z, who gathered in the first call some 17,000 people, including many elderly people, against the Morena executive, and now establishes himself as the main adversary of the president’s party, with whom he argues daily. The issue has not yet resulted in a candidacy, but the leader of the conservative PAN, Jorge Romero, opened the door in an interview with EL PAÍS for him to be his candidate for the 2030 presidential election. In this scenario, legal battles mix with political battles until they form a magma that is difficult to separate, since everything ends up leading to a struggle to win public opinion.
Despite this, the legal terrain leaves little room for a possible confrontation. The businessman lost in the lower courts against the SAT and the Supreme Court, which avoided ruling on the merits of the case, made the convictions handed down by the last court final. Congress had opened the way to recovery a month earlier, with the amparo reform promoted by the government, precisely to crush tax debtors like him. On the one hand, it was established that the protection against administrative acts requiring the payment of firm tax credits is inadmissible and removed the possibility of requesting the prescription of a definitive credit. On the other hand, it included a partial retroactivity clause which made it possible to apply the reform to files already opened and which were entering a new phase of the process: a way of not giving up the rapid recovery of the credits currently in dispute, which total two billion pesos and are in different instances.
Salinas Pliego’s public notoriety made the businessman the symbol of one of the main battles of the Morenist governments, increasing revenues without implementing tax reform in order to maintain the important and necessary financing of social programs. The only way to achieve this is to plug the holes through which the money that should already be entering the public coffers slips, and the millionaire has become, over time, an expert at locating these cracks. The Executive is now focused on closing them, and the Mexican tycoon has found that in just a few months his legal strategies of the last decade have been defeated. Entering the execution phase, you can only make one last resort, before the assets are auctioned, if you decide not to pay voluntarily. In both cases, experts say, the million-dollar debts will most likely be paid off within a year.
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