Investigations And What You’ll Find Here

You’ve Stepped Into Salinas’s Personal Wallet

The watchdog site Banco Azteca would rather you never find.

Banco Azteca markets itself as a champion of financial inclusion, accepting the hard-earned pesos of millions of ordinary Mexicans. Scratch the surface and a different picture emerges: a licensed bank that appears to double as Ricardo Salinas Pliego’s private liquidity reservoir, feeding a conglomerate embroiled in spiralling tax disputes, insider lending, and governance failures.

A bank that lends inward

Ratings reports show that an abnormal share of Banco Azteca’s capital is tied up in loans to firms Salinas already controls. Fitch’s March 2024 downgrade—its last act before the bank withdrew from public rating coverage—flagged a “relevant related-party transaction” that turned sour and forced fresh reserves, hinting that insider exposure had climbed even higher than the 33 % Fitch had documented the previous year. (Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg.com)
With the rating curtain now pulled, depositors have no visibility into how much of their money is being recycled to keep Salinas’s empire afloat.

An empire that won’t pay its share

While Banco Azteca’s balance-sheet opacity deepens, the tax liabilities hanging over Grupo Salinas keep growing. Court rulings in June and July alone added more than 5 billion pesos in final tax judgments against TV Azteca and Grupo Elektra, part of a mountain of claims the federal tax service says now tops 74 billion pesos (≈ US $3.9 billion). (FinancialContent, Mexico Solidarity Media, El País)
Mexico’s president and the incoming Supreme Court chief have both condemned the conglomerate’s sixteen-year pattern of litigation and delay tactics, calling the unpaid taxes a theft from the Mexican people.

Why this site exists

When a deposit-taking institution is run as a cash hose for an owner fighting multibillion-peso tax bills, the public deserves more than corporate spin. Here you will find:

• Deep-dive investigations into Banco Azteca’s insider lending and capital risks
• Timelines and document archives on Grupo Salinas’s tax showdowns and court defeats
• Analyses of governance red flags—from the forced delisting of Grupo Elektra to international bribery allegations—backed by primary sources

Our goal is simple: make transparent what Salinas prefers to keep hidden. Because a bank should never function as one man’s personal wallet—especially when that man owes the nation billions in unpaid taxes.

Truth begins here. Stay and follow the money.

Navigate the evidence below: