LETTER FROM MEXICO CITY
With his neatly trimmed beard, dressed in a dark gray suit and blue polka-dot tie, Carlos Slim, 84, placed a few notes in front of him and sat down for a four-hour press conference on Monday, February 12. When Latin America's richest man speaks, in his home country of Mexico, he takes his time. "Carlos Slim usually gives a conference every 12 to 18 months, and has been doing so for over 20 years," explained Renato Flores, his communications manager. In the 2000s, when he was the richest man in the world according to Forbes magazine, he began to give his opinion on the country's affairs and, it was said, to whisper in the ear of presidents.
"But this conference had not taken place for five years," added his spokesman. The billionaire gave no explanation for these years of silence, nor for the reason for this long conversation in February. But, as he spoke, it became clear that Slim wanted to respond to the Oxfam charity group's report entitled "The monopoly of inequality," which was published by several Mexican media outlets on January 23.
In the report, the organization stated that "extreme wealth inequality in Mexico continues to grow. The total wealth of Mexico's 14 ultra-rich individuals has almost doubled since the start of the [Covid-19] pandemic. In particular, that of Carlos Slim, the richest man on the continent, who has almost as much wealth as around 63.8 million Mexicans."
According to Oxfam, the wealth of the 14 Mexican billionaires profiled in the dossier stems from the privatizations of the 1990s, when the country sold off its state-owned companies: telecoms (Telmex) to Carlos Slim, trains (Ferromex) to German Larrea and television (TV Azteca) to Ricardo Salinas.
'Nonsense!'
What did Slim have to say about the Oxfam report at the press conference? "Studies on the concentration of wealth are nonsense! It's meaningless to calculate wealth, you have to base it on income," asserted the man who is currently 14th in Bloomberg's global billionaires index. A skillful way of evading the issue without addressing the substance – the staggering concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
Slim was also keen to "set the record straight on another piece of nonsense in this report. Telmex hasn't been profitable for a decade, but I don't want to sell [the company], I've told my children, I want it to stay Mexican." Slim's communications group, America Movil, of which Telmex is a part, is still the flagship of his conglomerate, ahead of building and public works, energy and finance.
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