The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said this Wednesday that his administration is reviewing the situation of up to 30 large national and foreign companies that allegedly have tax debts of around 100,000 million pesos (mdp).
The president, who did not specify the name of the companies, explained that in the coming days he will meet with the head of the Tax Administration Service (SAT), Raquel Buenrostro, and the head of the Large Taxpayers area, Antonio Martínez, to review these cases.
“They gave me a list of those who are lagging behind, now there are about 20 or 30 who have not paid, who owe, they are national and also foreign companies; we are going to do a review, in some cases it is because it had not been done audits, they had not been notified,” he said.
Since he came to power in 2018, López Obrador has promoted a crusade to ensure payment by the business sector of pending tax charges, which included a constitutional reform to eliminate the figure of tax forgiveness.
In 2020, several companies, such as the Mexican units of multinationals such as the Walmart retailer and Femsa, the Coca-Cola bottler, paid hundreds of millions of dollars in outstanding taxes after negotiating with the authorities.
In his usual daily press conference, the president clarified that Grupo Salinas, owned by tycoon Ricardo Salinas, who is a member of a business advisory council to the president, is not on the list, with whom he said that “an agreement is being sought.”
In April, that corporation, the parent company of television station TV Azteca, said that it will continue to fight in a legal dispute that has resulted in an order for it to pay some 120 million dollars to tax authorities.
The pressure of the SAT, which has included public threats to criminally prosecute the legal representatives of the companies as part of the campaign to make them resolve their tax disputes, has been considered by specialists as a violation of international law.
