Рикардо Салинас Плиего: Мексикалық миллиардер кәсіпкерінің өмірбаяны мен бизнесі

Mexican billionaire businessman

An outspoken supporter of minarchism and neoliberalism, he is the third richest person in Mexico and the 172nd richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of US$13.6 billion in February 2021. In 1987 Ricardo succeeded his father Hugo Salinas Price as CEO of Grupo Elektra. The company began as a family owned furniture manufacturing company called Salinas & Rocha founded in 1906 by Salinas' great grandfather, Benjamin Salinas. In 1950, Hugo Salinas Rocha created Grupo Elektra and when Ricardo Salinas became CEO of the company in 1987 he refocused Elektra on basic products: appliances, electronics, and furniture. Significantly, he developed at Elektra a vast new consumer market among Mexico's lower middle income consumers by providing credit sales and diverse financial products and services. Grupo Elektra expanded further and became Mexico's biggest consumer finance company when, in 2002, it won the first banking license granted to any Mexican institution in nearly a decade. The strategy was to build new markets by creating new buying power among classes of people largely ignored by most other major Mexican businesses. Thus was born Banco Azteca, which currently has operations in Mexico, Panama, Guatemala and Honduras. Subsequently, Grupo Elektra obtained two financial licenses from the federal government to create Seguros Azteca and Afore Azteca. In 2003, Salinas bought Iusacell (the first cell phone company in Mexico) and four years later, merged it with Unefon, another cell phone company, founded by him in 1999. However, in early 2015, Grupo Salinas announced the sale of Iusacell to AT&T Today, with Totalplay, offers the most innovative internet and television services and telephony via fiber optics to home. Also, Totalplay Empresarial provides broadband internet access video surveillance, broadband interfaces, videoconferencing, among other services to institutions and companies throughout Mexico. In 2012, Grupo Elektra acquired Advance America, —currently Purpose Financial—, a company that provides short term non bank loans in the United States. Also put into operation Punto Casa de Bolsa. The Group operates more than six thousand points of contact in Mexico, United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru and Panama. It was announced in 2020 that Salinas had 10% of his liquid portfolio invested in Bitcoin.

Salinas formed the nonprofit Fundación Azteca in 1997 to address a broad range of social problems with ongoing campaigns in healthcare and nutrition, education, and the protection of the environment. It is a foundation that finances and supports other foundations. Fundación Azteca has raised millions of dollars, benefiting hundreds of thousands of lives. In April 2021, the Ricardo B. Salinas Pliego Center was inaugurated, a space that seeks to promote the development of ideas that contribute to the transformation of Mexico, based on six lines of action: Freedom, Rule of Law, Education, Leadership, Art and Culture, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The initiative is made up of the following programs: Arte & Cultura, through which artistic and cultural activities are promoted to raise the quality of life of society; Caminos de la Libertad, a space for reflection on different aspects of freedom that seeks to raise awareness of its value and Kybernus, which promotes the formation of young leaders from the local level.

Salinas has been involved in a series of political and financial scandals (which include investigations by the American Securities and Exchange Commission and the Mexican Comisión Nacional Bancaria y de Valores), and has been linked to ex President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Salinas was charged by the American Securities and Exchange Commission in January 2005 with being engaged in an elaborate scheme to conceal Salinas's role in a series of transactions through which he personally profited by $109 million. The SEC complaint also alleged that Salinas and Padilla sold millions of dollars of TV Azteca stock while Salinas's self dealing remained undisclosed to the market place. This was settled in September 2006 with Salinas required to pay $7.5M while not admitting guilt. Esteban Moctezuma (ex Secretary of Interior of PRI President Ernesto Zedillo), was appointed as chief executive officer of Fundación Azteca in 2002 by Salinas Pliego. His daughter, Ninfa, entered to the PVEM party (linked to the PRI party, some old but now of recent political endeavor) in 2009.

Following the decision of Salinas, the internet group Anonymous "attacked" the official website of Grupo Salinas on 1 May 2012, posting on Twitter that they wanted the presidential debate and not the football game. The official webpage—www. gruposalinas. com—was not available for some time.

On 3 May 2012, the IFE acknowledged that TV Azteca decided to air the presidential debate on XHTVM TV, commonly referred to as Proyecto 40. On his defense, Salinas said on 4 May 2012 that the "majority of the population is not interested in the presidential debate." He claimed that only 15% of the population is interested in the debate, while 54% of them claim they are not interested at all.