Corruption Probe Targets Mexico’s Business Elite

Ricardo Salinas Pliego says it was “perfectly natural” for him to borrow nearly $30 million from the president’s elder brother in his quest to buy the nation’s second most powerful television network from the government in 1993.

“It was an honor, a social distinction, to be a friend of his brother,” says Salinas Pliego, one of more than a dozen Mexican entrepreneurs who became billionaires when then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari privatized much of the nation’s economy in the first half of the decade.

“In that era,” says Salinas Pliego, who is unrelated to the former first family, “Mexico was a different country.”

On Monday, with Raul Salinas de Gortari in jail on murder and corruption charges and the ex-president in exile, Salinas Pliego became one of the first of Mexico’s business elite to be officially targeted in an expanding investigation into corruption during Carlos Salinas’ six years in power.

Mexican prosecutors spent nearly six hours questioning the 40-year-old television magnate about $29.8 million he says Raul Salinas lent him when he bought TV Azteca for $669 million. Salinas Pliego said after the questioning that he had told investigators the money was part of a legitimate business deal with the president’s brother--a respected businessman who was not in public office at the time--and that it was channeled legally through bank accounts in Panama and the Cayman Islands.

Monday’s interrogation, a transcript of which Salinas Pliego has pledged to make public, came amid almost daily revelations of multimillion-dollar business deals and investments by Raul Salinas with other members of Mexico’s corporate elite.

As investigators in Mexico, Europe and the United States attempt to trace the origin of more than $100 million linked to Raul Salinas in European banks, prosecutors here increasingly appear to be examining the way business was done under “Salinismo”--government policies that included one of the world’s most ambitious free-market privatization programs.

The investigation into Raul Salinas’ wealth surfaced last fall when Swiss police arrested his wife as she tried to withdraw $83 million from Swiss bank accounts held in a Salinas alias. Swiss prosecutors said they froze the accounts in an international money laundering investigation.

The elder Salinas, who is being tried here in the 1994 slaying of a top ruling party official, said through his lawyer that the money came from legitimate business; the former president said he knew nothing about it.

The widening probe already is affecting Mexico’s financial market: The stocks of all the major companies publicly tied to the corruption investigation had fallen at the close of Monday’s trading.

“The entire privatization process under Salinas is going to be questioned, one way or another,” said Rogelio Ramirez de la O, an independent economic consultant. “We are going to see more of these types of inquiries.”

The intricacies of the privatization are likely to become even more public beginning Wednesday, when a Mexican congressional committee is scheduled to launch a separate investigation into TV Azteca--hearings that are expected to touch on other privatization deals involving Raul Salinas.

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Official documents leaked to the press here in recent weeks have linked the former president’s brother to the sale of a state bus company and to partnerships with prominent Mexicans including a senior banker, a top manufacturing magnate and even an anchorman for TV Azteca’s main competitor, Televisa, the nation’s largest network.

Salinas Pliego is the largest single stockholder--along with his family--of a network widely considered Mexico’s most independent.

After prosecutors questioned him Monday, Salinas Pliego blamed the controversy over the TV Azteca purchase partly on “media with bad intentions that want to get rid of the competitors”--specifically Televisa, he said.