“Shell companies in Mexico have become a plague,” warns Dr. Luis Pérez de Acha, an expert in Constitutional, Fiscal, and Administrative Law, who has addressed the issue in courses, workshops, and conferences.
The expert will teach the workshop “Professional tracking of shell companies” at the Carlos Septién journalism school, Pérez de Acha points out that during the electoral season, more of these companies are generated to finance political campaigns.
The expert, who from 2017 to 2019 was part of the Citizen Participation Committee of the National Anti-Corruption System, emphasizes that shell companies are a plague on federal, state, and municipal public finances.
He explained that these types of businesses, which have been used to evade taxes, in the last 15 years have become “shamelessly the ideal way to evade.”
But what is most striking, he points out, is that the authorities have not acted despite the complaints that are aired at all levels and for different amounts, “which gives an idea that there is complicity and important protections.”
In that sense, the professor also highlights that journalistic reports are key to denouncing and exposing ghost companies, which are predatory and cause a lot of money to be lost.
He highlights that the idea of the workshop “Professional tracing of ghost companies” is not only to share how complicities are constituted or how they are intertwined but also “to make something happen.”
And, as he says, a constant complaint from journalists is that despite the time invested in the reports, nothing happens with the evidence that is obtained. “But I think it does happen, a lot.”
The expert expresses that the only remedy he sees in the short term is to combat tax evasion in the same way as combating drug trafficking and terrorism.
From 2014 to date, the SAT has only published 11,000 companies of this type, which together have invoiced 4 billion pesos. That gives us an idea of the enormous amount of money that is involved if we think that there could easily be 100 thousand or 200 thousand shell companies.
Those 4 billion, he calculates, represent 40% of the 2024 federal budget, which is 9 million. “That amount of money seems gigantic to me.”
The specialist points out that the very name “shell companies” is misleading since they are established companies that operate and issue tax receipts. “Shell are their services.”
He adds that there are ghost companies of all sizes and in different areas such as construction, IT, brand purchasing, gas stations, and architectural services. The limit, he says, is the creativity of the person who creates them.
“Now, those of us who pay the bills are the taxpayers who pay appropriately,” says Pérez de Acha, who reiterates that this is a “huge problem with a difficult solution.”
TYT Newsroom
