MEXICO CITY (Process).– With the purpose of postponing the payment of Income Tax (ISR) for up to three years, once again the companies of Grupo Salinas resort to tax strategies.
For this, the businessman Ricardo Salinas Pliego catapults and privileges in his operation the company called “Nueva Elektra del Milenio”, a holding company that adheres to the tax regime for holding companies, which was designed in 2013 to also reduce the effective rate of taxes.
The tax system from which it intends to benefit appeared with the tax reform in the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, which disappeared the tax consolidation regime through which large companies engaged in tax evasion.
According to documents from Elektra –a household appliance firm, whose shares are listed on the stock market, which is also controlled by Banco Azteca–, Salinas Pliego once again incorporated its business activities into a special tax regime, despite the fact that it is in the midst of a series of of lawsuits to challenge tax credits by not paying the ISR on time and form. For this, he needed authorization from the SAT officials themselves.
Nueva Elektra has now resorted to the changes approved in 2013 for the consolidation of companies, which, once again, will allow it to delay payment of taxes –as it has done for the last two decades– while risk rating agencies, such as HR Ratings , adjust their assessments of the degree of risk of the debt backed by the flows of Ricardo Salinas Pliego’s group via Nueva Elektra del Milenio (NEM).
Although the fiscal consolidation regime that allowed a company’s losses to be included and lower effective tax rates to be accredited to the SAT, the lawyers of Grupo Salinas found in the modifications to the Income Tax Law, approved in the government of Peña Nieto, a way to reduce the payment of tax contributions and replace, without major problems, the extinct tax consolidation regime, one of the main sources of controversy against the SAT raised by the businessman’s team of lawyers.
Several of the tax credits that the SAT claimed from Elektra were those corresponding to the payment of ISR for the year 2013, when the tax consolidation regime was extinguished and, from there, Grupo Salinas toughened the controversy to assert tax criteria that were repealed after lawmakers changed the rules to prevent loss consolidation.
Ricardo Salinas Pliego’s advisors integrated into Nueva Elektra del Milenio companies whose main objective is the management of the flows of their subsidiaries, regardless of the fact that these companies still have disputes with the tax authorities that will reach the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) given the intense litigation in courts of first and second instance.
Fragment of the report published in the second monthly edition of the magazine Processwhose digital edition can be purchased at this link.
