Mexico’s loudest tax rebel now pays the SAT every month

For most of the past decade Ricardo Salinas Pliego treated Mexico’s tax authority, the SAT, as a sparring partner. The owner of TV Azteca, the retailer Elektra and Banco Azteca contested assessment after assessment in the courts, and mocked the government on social media while he did it.

This year he started paying. On 29 January the SAT announced an agreement under which Grupo Salinas would pay 32,132,897,658 pesos, about $1.87bn, covering disputed income tax from as far back as 2008. Of that, 10.4bn pesos was deposited immediately. The rest is due in 18 monthly instalments.

By September, according to Mexican press tallies, Salinas had kept up every payment and cleared more than 40 per cent of the total. About 18.15bn pesos remains.

How the fight ended

The dispute ran through the courts for years. Mexico’s Supreme Court resolved the main cases against Grupo Salinas in November 2025, rejecting its appeals. In February it ruled against the group’s last pending challenge, leaving Totalplay, its cable and internet business, owing another 645mn pesos.

Estimates of the group’s historic liability ran to about 74bn pesos. In December the SAT said it expected to collect around 51bn pesos in January. The settlement came in lower, at 32.1bn, with the balance spread over a year and a half.

Whether that counts as a victory depends on who is asked. The group said at the time that it still disagreed with the rulings and was paying more than it considered fair. The government has its money, or most of it. Salinas avoided paying the largest figures that had been attached to his name.

“Paying each month”

President Claudia Sheinbaum, who spent much of 2025 trading public barbs with Salinas, now describes the arrangement matter-of-factly. At her morning briefing on 9 September she said he was “paying each month what was owed from Elektra”, and that the money was going to welfare programmes and student grants.

Salinas, for his part, has taken to pointing out that he does pay tax. In late August he used his own platforms to make the point, after years in which his name was shorthand in Mexico for the rich man who would not.

The broader numbers suggest his settlement mattered. The finance ministry reported that arrears owed by large taxpayers fell by 54bn pesos, to about 1.1tn pesos, in the first quarter of 2026. El Imparcial, the Sonora newspaper, linked much of the fall to Salinas’s first payment.

The monthly bill

Spread over 18 months, the remaining instalments come to more than a billion pesos each. That is a substantial sum even for a group of Grupo Salinas’s size, and it is paid in public, to a government its owner has spent years attacking.

Salinas has hinted at political ambitions of his own. If he pursues them, the instalment schedule will be one of the few documents in Mexican politics that both sides agree is accurate.

Sources

• Bloomberg: Billionaire Salinas reaches tax deal with Mexican government (29 Jan 2026)
• El Universal: Salinas Pliego agrees to pay SAT more than 32bn pesos
• Tus Buenas Noticias: how much Salinas Pliego still owes (11 Sep 2026)
• El Imparcial: Supreme Court rules against Totalplay’s last appeal (20 Feb 2026)
• Proceso: SAT expects to collect 51bn pesos from Grupo Salinas (19 Dec 2025)
• El Imparcial: large taxpayers’ arrears fall 54bn pesos
• Proceso: Salinas Pliego says he does pay taxes (26 Aug 2026)

Cover image: Alejandro Islas Photograph AC, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Cropped.