Carlos Slimthe Mexican telecommunications magnate, He became the richest person in Latin America in 2022, and was ranked 13th in the list of the world’s greatest fortunes published in April of last year by the magazine Forbes.
The 82-year-old businessman, who gained three positions from 2021, He has a net worth of about $81.2 billion., according to the calculations of the medium. This represents a difference of 18,400 million dollars with respect to the fortune of 62,800 million dollars that was attributed to him two years ago.
How did Slim manage to increase his fortune in a period of global crisis?
When Mexican families most needed public goods and services to reduce out-of-pocket spending, Slim and other billionaires were the big winners of this crisis in Mexico, seeing their fortunes grow by up to 33% during the pandemic.
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In this sense, the wealth of the Mexican ‘elite’ grew 117 times faster than the rest of the economy. In fact, the report Who pays the bill? published by oxfamreports that the national economy increased by barely 0.28% during the same period.
For every 100 pesos of wealth created between 2019 and 2021, 21 pesos went to the 1% richest sector and barely 0.40 pesos to the poorest 50%. The richest 1% of the population —barely 1.2 million people— concentrates almost 47 out of every 100 pesos of wealth in the country,” the document says.
Only Carlos Slim —who concentrates more wealth than half of the Mexican population— and 14 other compatriot billionaires together, He has seen his fortune grow by 42% since the start of the pandemic until November 2022.
For context, that number equates to an additional $25 billion, $750 million a month, $25 million a day, or $1 million an hour, on average. His fortune, according to oxfamhas multiplied by five in the last 22 years.
In contrast, in almost three years of pandemic, Poverty levels in the country reached 44 out of every 100 Mexicans. In 2020, the health crisis had such an impact that nine out of 100 people were on the streets.
Why didn’t the pandemic affect the pocket of millionaires?
The report states that taxpayers with income above 500 million pesos per year barely represented 0.03% of total tax collection and 13.6% of tax collection from individuals in 2021.
In the case of large companies, they paid —at the same period—, effective ISR rates between 1 and 8% of total income, well below the 30% established by Law. “When the super-rich don’t pay, we pay.”
Finally, large estates do not pay taxes at the federal level in the Mexican Republic. But what would happen if they did? It would allow the collection of up to 270,000 million pesos a year, Approximate figure to the annual budget of the federal government.
This would be enough, for example, to increase current federal public health spending by almost 40% or to multiply current federal spending on environmental protection by 17 times,” the document states.
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