Ricardo Salinas Pliego is taking his flirtation with politics ever further. This weekend, during an intimate celebration of his 70th birthday organized by his wife María Laura Medina in Malinalco (State of Mexico), the businessman issued more messages in the same vein, each time more explicit. “I think it’s time for another challenge, to enter another phase, and why not? It’s time to kick the shit out of the leftists and send them to hell,” he said before more than 300 guests who cheered him: “President, President!”
The hacienda in Malinalco was decorated with special decorations. Photos of banknotes with the businessman’s face, images of Margaret Thatcher, and giant illustrations of Bitcoin. In this way, Salinas Pliego is warming up for what will be a massive crowd. This Saturday, he will test his power to attract voters with another celebration, this one massive, at the Mexico City Arena, a concert venue in the capital. The fifth richest man in Mexico will be accompanied by artists such as singer Carlos Rivera, the group Cumbia Machine, and Myst.
The businessman has been riding the wave of the culture war for some time. Through his X account, he has spent the last few years attacking anything resembling the left, feminism, or social policies. But since this summer, when he announced the creation of a movement with many nods to Trumpism, his political activity has intensified with posts and messages that seem to suggest his entry into institutional politics.
This acceleration in his public role comes, in any case, at a delicate moment in his relationship with the Treasury. Salinas Pliego owes 74 billion pesos to the Tax Administration Service (SAT) for unpaid taxes. President Claudia Sheinbaum herself has alluded to the case on more than one occasion, accusing the businessman of trying to politicize the tax claim. “Debts are not politicized, they are paid; it’s that simple,” the president declared.
The owner of the Salinas Group, with a fortune valued at around $5 billion, also said this weekend that “after 40 years of doing business and other things, I think it’s time to return to the issue of public affairs. What’s the point of having businesses and being successful when the environment is crumbling away from you?” Back in September, the magnate announced the Anti-Corruption and Anti-Crime Movement (MAAC). Accompanied by businessmen, politicians, and journalists, all in the trenches of the most visceral opposition to Obradorism, he presented a decalogue for moving from “dictatorship to democracy,” a kind of anarcho-capitalist self-help manual.
Meanwhile, the businessman continued to send messages on his social media, including offers to the government to negotiate its debts and accusations of personal attacks. President Sheinbaum rejected the proposal to establish an “open, serious, and transparent” dialogue table to reach an agreement on the debts to the treasury that his business group is carrying. “This is not a matter of backroom negotiations; it’s a matter of law. There have been many technical roundtables on this particular case. He or this group has the right to what any debtor has the right to if they pay,” the president said.
Salinas’s conflicts with the Treasury also have an international dimension. A group of US creditors is denouncing the payment of approximately $580 million in debt and interest. The creditors have been engaged in a legal dispute with Salinas Pliego since he refused to pay the bonds issued in the US market in 2022. To try to halt this legal process in the United States, Salinas Pliego appealed to the Mexican courts, which ruled in his favor.
But on September 22, the judge ordered that Salinas Pliego’s companies must abandon their legal defense in Mexico, since when they accepted the bond issue in 2017, they agreed that any differences would be resolved in New York. This is a new legal setback for the magnate, who a week earlier was forced to pay $25 million bail due to another lawsuit over a multi-million-dollar tax debt that AT&T accuses him of leaving when they acquired his Iusacell telephone network in 2015.
Source: elpais
