The day the bill arrived: Salinas and his forced appointment with the Treasury
It seems that the Tax Administration Service (SAT) finally went from sending friendly reminders to the “have you already paid?” mode. aloft. After losing seven – yes, seven – legal rounds in front of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, Ricardo Salinas Pliego ran out of tricks up his sleeve and resources in the bank. The final amount of your debt, the one that has been dragging on since the times when we used MSN Messenger (fiscal years 2008-2013, to be exact), has been set at a figure that hurts even to pronounce: 51,000 million pesos, with all the late fees included, like that compound interest that forgives no one, not even the tycoons.
The director of the treasury, Antonio Martínez Dagnino, basically has the formal notification ready to send in January, like the Three Wise Men gift that no one wants to receive. Meanwhile, President Claudia Sheinbaum has come out to clarify that this is not personal, it is just business (or rather, law), trying to tone down the political tone of an issue that smacks of controversy for miles around. For his part, Salinas Pliego, from his trench on social networks, has adopted the pose of the responsible citizen who wants to “close this chapter”, but not before reminding everyone that he has already spent more than 285,000 million pesos during the lawsuit. A detail that he surely mentions every time he talks about the subject.
Where did this million-dollar debt come from?
All this fiscal laxity was born from a creative misunderstanding with the accounts. It turns out that the Treasury considered that the calculation of the tax losses of his company, Elektra, was a little too “optimistic” and improperly reduced what it had to pay to the treasury. After years of legal battles that cost more than several seasons of a lawyer series on Netflix, the courts ruled in favor of the treasury. The moral: even to deduct losses there is an instruction manual that cannot be skipped. Now, the only light at the end of the tunnel for the businessman is that, if he pays voluntarily and without further ado, he could negotiate a reduction of up to 39% on the total. Something like the cash payment discount, but on a multimillion-dollar scale.
The federal government already has plans for that money: allocate it to social programs such as pensions for older women and scholarships. A move that clearly seeks to paint the charge with shades of social justice. On the political level, the issue is a minefield. Salinas Pliego has known how to use his notoriety and this fight with the tax authority to position himself as a fierce critic of the current administration, fueling rumors and speculation about whether all this is the preamble to a future adventure in electoral politics, although at the moment he has not launched any formal candidacy.
With the execution phase just around the corner, the businessman’s options are reduced to one: pay or face seizure of his assets, with a possible last legal resort that sounds more like Hail Mary than a solid strategy. Analysts, for their part, predict that, whether you pay voluntarily or do so through forced means, this epic chapter of tax debts will probably be paid off within a year. So get ready for more tweets, more statements and the end of one of the most expensive fiscal soap operas in recent Mexican history.
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