Plasti-Esteril, founded by the Peñas, would be one of the firms under scrutiny

Dora Villanueva

Newspaper La Jornada
Friday, July 8, 2022, p. 5

A company for the manufacture and distribution of sterile products based in Atlacomulco, founded by the family of Enrique Peña Nieto and acquired by the American Baxter International, received billions of pesos in contracts in the administration of the former president, although the same firm has ruled out that the link with the PRI is maintained to date.

The digital format of the Public Registry of Commerce (RPC) shows the brothers Peña Nieto, Arturo and Enrique as shareholders of Plasti-Esteril, part of Baxter. However, some time ago, when this information came out to the media, the firm detailed that the man from Mexico and his family stopped participating in the company during the 90s of the last century.

The profile of the manufacturer of sterile products agrees with that described by the head of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), Pablo Gómez, about one of the two firms with which Peña Nieto has corporate ties and in which “fiscal and financial irregularities were identified.

Company B was established by the former president and relatives before the PRI was president, that it has a symbiotic relationship with a transnational corporation, which benefited from federal government contracts during the administration of the then head of the Executivereports the document.

Gómez expanded that the referred firm benefited as provider and service provider in the past administration, through contracts for 10 thousand 530 million pesos, and in the period from 2015 to 2021 it sent 261 international transfers to the United States, Ireland and the United Kingdom without apparent justification, which presumes a resource dispersal scheme.

Earlier this year, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission ruled on an investigation against Baxter and proposed a fine of 18 million dollars, due to intra-firm operations, Improper internal currency exchange resulting in the misstatement of the company’s net incomeaccording to the regulator.

Beginning at least in 2009 and continuing through July 2019, Baxter improperly took advantage of its foreign exchange convention by engaging in intra-company transactions for the purpose of generating foreign exchange accounting gains or avoiding foreign exchange accounting losses.the SEC documents read.

At the conference, Gómez did not name the companies involved, even, unlike the president, he avoided naming Peña Nieto, since there is now a process in the Attorney General’s Office.

Regarding the other company linked to Peña Nieto, the head of the FIU stated that the former president shares the quality of shareholder with blood relatives, and through it operations are carried out that are not consistent with its corporate purpose and tax profile. In the digital RPC there is no other company, in addition to Plastic-Esteril, in which the former president appears as a partner, nor his children.