Report on Mexico Banking Bailout

* Sergio Munoz’s article on the recent audit report on Mexico’s banking bailout (Commentary, July 29) is ill-informed and biased.

The Mexican Congress commissioned an independent audit intended to investigate the adequacy and legality of the measures taken by the administration during the banking bailout. It did not seek “to establish whether a Mexican businessman, currently jailed in Australia, had used his bank to contribute to PRI political campaigns and then was repaid through the banking rescue,” as Munoz falsely claims.

Claims of corruption and connivance during the bailout were comprehensively refuted by the report. Supposedly illegal transactions account for less than 1% of all operations carried out during the rescue process and in most cases had already prompted the authorities to initiate legal proceedings against the alleged culprits. As a result of the authorities’ actions, there are currently some 225 people on trial or under investigation for alleged financial offenses.

Munoz fails to indicate that the auditor did not find any evidence that funds provided to the PRI had ended up as part of the fiscal cost of the banking rescue. There is, therefore, no valid reason to link PRI finances to the banking bailout.

Munoz states that the brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was able to amass through “unknown” means a fortune in excess of $100 million. Yet he fails to mention that the man in question, Raul Salinas, is currently serving a 27-year sentence in a Mexico penitentiary and is standing trial for other offenses, including charges for money laundering.

Accountability is not an unknown word in Mexican politics, as Munoz pretends.

MARCO PROVENCIO

Spokesman, Ministry of Finance

and Public Credit

Mexico City