Читать книгу Carlos Slim - Diego Osorno - Страница 18
ОглавлениеThe term “technocrat” was coined by H. G. Wells in one of his science fiction novels published in the early twentieth century. Now it could be defined as a science or technology expert with a great deal of power or influence over the government, regardless of political or ideological convictions. The term has been applied at various decisive moments in Mexico’s political life to Jacques Rogozinski, who completed his PhD in economics at the University of Colorado.
Rogozinski was working for the Mexican National Lottery in the 1980s when he received the invitation to become part of the central sector of the federal government of Mexico from Pedro Aspe, an MIT economist and one of the main members of Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s team. As president of the PRI party, between 1988 and 1994 Salinas de Gortari sold most of Mexico’s state-owned companies, including Telmex.
“Hey, why don’t you come and work with me? Cut the umbilical chord already,” said Aspe, who was then secretary of programming and budget in the cabinet of Miguel de la Madrid, the president in power prior to Salinas de Gortari. That is how Rogozinski and Aspe were tasked, in early 1988, with the mission of studying privatization around the world. Rogozinski recalls Aspe’s request: “All I want you to do is travel and research what different countries are doing with privatizations in general, and some in particular, such as telecommunications.”
During Salinas de Gortari’s presidential campaign, Rogozinski visited countries like Italy, Germany and Chile, although he focused mainly on the privatizing processes taking place in France and England. “As you know, Mrs. Thatcher was the figurehead of privatization and she was the one who got furthest with it,” says Rogozinski. “I also had the opportunity to visit France and see how they had done it, although they had not exactly privatized the company, instead they had modernized the entire telephony department of France Telecom.”
After his travels, Rogozinski reached the conclusion that Mexico had no other choice than to privatize the majority of its state-run companies. In his diagnostic report, he considered that during the government of Luis Echeverría (1970–76) the state-owned sector had grown excessively. The government was operating 1,100 companies, which included everything from a milk factory to a bicycle factory to steelworks such as Altos Hornos de México.
“Why the heck should the government be running, for example, a factory producing piña colada mix?” asks Rogozinski. “And then you had the problem of the steelworks, except those produced practically nothing and it was the most outrageous waste of money. For example, in Sicartsa, a steel plant in Michoacán, you produced 100 million tons of steel and lost $100 million producing it. Obviously it makes more sense to shut it down.”
It’s important to remember that even before doing his research, Rogozinski was already in favor of privatization. “But not evangelically,” he clarifies. “It’s not that the government couldn’t have any public companies. With the Second World War, when there was no more steel left in the world, and when in Mexico there was not enough technology, or enough people with that financial capacity, a decision was made for the government to create steelworks. I think that was brilliant, because the United States was consuming all the steel. What is not clear is why we should applaud that fifty years later—you still have that company under the control of the State, when you already have steel coming out of your ears.”
After his exploration of the neoliberal universe, Rogozinski concluded that it was best to start the privatization process with the smallest companies. “That way, if you stick your foot in it, there’s no catastrophic consequences,” he explains.
With that idea in mind, one of the first privatizations he oversaw was El Mirador de Acapulco, a hotel owned by the Mexican government and located beside the iconic cliff of La Quebrada, popular with daring local divers. But Salinas de Gortari had his eye on the telecom sector especially.
During the interview Rogozinski offered me in his office at Nacional Financiera, the government body he leads for Enrique Peña Nieto’s government, he showed me a document in English entitled “Policy Options for Restructure in Telecommunications Industry Structure and Regulation in Mexico.”
“What’s the date on it?” I asked when he showed it to me.
“December 10, 1988.”
That was just months after the contested general elections, in which widespread allegations of electoral fraud led to massive protests. Already, with Salinas de Gortari as president, Rogozinski had a diagnostic report under his arm and plenty of resources to help the new administration begin the bidding process. Telmex was one of the main targets.
“Why the heck would you not want to privatize a company where practically all local calls were free and long distance financed everything else? What’s more, the way the company was organized for long distance calls was a disaster: if you wanted to make a call from Monterrey to Nuevo Laredo, because of the way Telmex was structured, the call had to go from Monterrey to Mexico City and from Mexico City to Nuevo Laredo!”
Speaking of the north of Mexico, the industrial conglomerate Grupo Alfa, the most important consortium in the country at that time, had conducted its own research on the national telecommunications sector, aiming to take over Telmex. Rogozinski recalls meeting with the businessmen in Monterrey and realizing that at the time the consortium had two very strong internal groups: one formed by young people and another, more traditional one. A member of the latter was Bernardo Garza Sada, then president of Grupo Alfa. The businessmen were considering submitting a bid for Telmex and invited Rogozinski to travel to Monterrey to talk about that possibility.
Rogozinski went there, and while they were eating sushi, Bernardo Garza Sada received a card from his assistant. The businessman excused himself, saying that the minister of finance, Pedro Aspe, was on the phone.
When he returned, Rogozinski said jokingly:
“Don’t tell me the minister of finance called you to say you’re in hot water over your taxes?”
“No, it’s worse than that,” the president of Alfa replied seriously.
“What do you mean, worse?”
“He just informed me that Mr. President, Carlos Salinas, has just decided that the steel industry will be privatized, and now bidding for Telmex is definitely out of the question. We are going to focus on the industry we know about.”
In the end, Alfa did not take part in the bid for Telmex. The other two consortiums that participated along with Grupo Carso were Grupo Gentor, led by another Monterrey businessman, Javier Garza Sepúlveda (a childhood friend of Salinas de Gortari), as well as Accival Casa de Bolsa, owned by banker Roberto Hernández, in partnership with Telefónica de España and the company GTE.
The political columns of certain Mexican newspapers used to be the platform through which the PRI regime would communicate the decisions made by the president or government officials regarding sensitive issues. Telmex was one of them, and reading the columns from those years, you get the impression that the favorite candidate and likely winner in the bid was not Slim but Roberto Hernández, who already possessed a significant amount of shares and was on the company’s board of directors. Hernández’s defeat caused the relationship with Slim to cool, although the banker adhered to social convention and in the end published a newspaper spread that conceded the process.
“Numbers are numbers in this bid! There’s no two ways about it,” says Rogozinski when explaining that Slim won because he submitted the best bid and not because he received any presidential help.
“So, to what do you attribute the widespread perception that the bid was rigged?”
“I’ll explain why that perception was created. I recommend you read my book Mitos y mentadas de la economía mexicana (Myths and Mockery in the Mexican Economy). Selling ideas using the media has become an efficient mechanism for developed nations, dominant businesses, important politicians and many others to kick away the ladder for others. In the public discourse of government functionaries, businesspeople and intellectuals kindly offer needy nations access to the ladder, but only in private do they kick it away. And here I give several examples. None of this is new: in the 1990s, global multilateral organizations such as the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank, mainly financed and controlled by developing countries, defended the thesis that it was desirable to privatize national businesses. The spokespersons of the Washington Consensus claimed that countries need not worry about the need of new owners: all the global companies were presented as prophets of progress, as voluntary militants in favor of developing countries. If you got distracted, you might start believing that the world was full of good Samaritans. And the media were one of the most useful tools to spread these ideas, but time has demonstrated the fallacy.”
Before the Telmex bid, according to Rogozinski, Slim was very reluctant to participate. President Salinas de Gortari himself and minister of finance Pedro Aspe invited him to accompany them on a tour in Japan and they discussed the subject during the long-haul flight.
“When Salinas, Aspe and Slim returned from the trip to Japan, the secretary said to me: ‘I think we’ve managed to persuade Slim, but he still hasn’t fully made a decision; can you go and convince him.’” A few days later, Rogozinski went to see Slim in his home. “I was with Slim in his home, which by the way had a pool that never had water in it, and he says, ‘If I enter and win, it will change my life and I don’t know if that’s what I want. The whole family gets together every Sunday at home. I’ll talk to them this Sunday, and on Monday I’ll let you know what I’ve decided.’”
Rogozinski returned on Monday and Slim said he would submit a bid. So, on November 15, 1990, he presented his proposal to purchase Telmex. He did it through Grupo Carso, S.A. de C.V., according to the original documentation consulted. Grupo Carso’s proposal included Seguros de México, S.A. de C.V. (Segumex), France Cables et Radio, S.A. (“France Cables”) and Southwestern Bell International Holdings (SBIH) Corporation. The offer was to buy Telmex Series AA shares at $0.80165 per share, for a total of 2,163,040,972 AA shares, together with a stock option for Telmex Series L shares. Grupo Carso and Segumex participated with the majority of the Mexican group package, while France Cables and SBIH underwrote in equal parts the total of the foreign group. The purchase of all the shares and the stock option was carried out through a special trust fund.
The formal proposal with which Slim won Telmex states that the group of investors “wishes to support the development and spread of knowledge in the field of telecommunications in Mexico, for which purpose it proposes to establish, carry out and finance education programs and training in said field, acting through the appropriate Mexican institutions.” It also clarifies that the offer was under the condition that, by December 7, 1990, the company SBIH would waive certain restrictions imposed by the courts of the United States of America, referred to as “Modification of Final Judgment-MFJ.”
Slim and his partners attached to the proposal a “modernization plan” and a “joint-venture association contract,” which specified the equity participation of each one of the members of the consortium. “In its totality,” says the text by Slim and his partners, “they comprise a powerful and singular combination that meets all the necessary attributes to make Telmex one of the top telecommunications companies in the world.” It goes on to provide a profile for each of the shareholders:
Grupo Carso is one of the most important industrial conglomerates in Mexico, with a successful track record in the management and modernization of complex businesses. France Cables, wholly owned by France Telecom, which in turn depends on the French government and is considered among the main international telecommunications companies, has widely demonstrated its ability to rapidly and effectively modernize large-scale telecommunications systems. SBIH is a wholly owned subsidiary of Southwestern Bell Corporation, a publicly listed stock corporation recognized in the industry as a leader in network operations management and development of mobile communications and telephone directories.
Other documents that formed the offer include a series of receipts for the deposits left as security for $50 million, copies of authorizations and powers of the members of the consortium, and the sales contract of the members of the consortium in case the government accepted the offer and the trust agreement of Grupo Carso, France Telecom and Southwestern Bell. Slim and his partners also clarified that, should they win the bid, they would need to discuss with the government aspects of the concession titles of Telmex and the business service, as well as technical assistance contracts.
Jaime Chico Prado, who at the time was one of Slim’s associates, signed the formal proposal and provided as his address 1020 Sierra Vertiente, in Lomas de Chapultepec in Mexico City. The message ends with a succinct list of motives: “We have a great deal of interest in the challenges and opportunities that the privatization of Telmex represents, and we would like to underline our absolute dedication to the task of collaborating with Telmex and the government to develop a world-class telecommunications system.”
One little-known aspect of Slim’s formal proposal to purchase Telmex is the special participation of a group of Mexican entrepreneurs. The document states that other shareholders—through Grupo Carso, on behalf of third parties—were businessmen Agustín Franco (and family), Miguel Alemán, Rómulo O’Farril, Bernardo Quintana, Antonio y Moisés Cosío, Ángel Lozada Moreno, Manuel Espinosa Yglesisas, Antonio del Valle, the Mary Street Jenkins Foundation, José Miguel Nader, Claudio X. González, Antonio Chedraui, Ángel Demerutis Elizarraraz, investors from Sinaloa, such as Ignacio Cobo, and investors from Tabasco.
Rogozinski claims it is wrong to state that Slim purchased Telmex in 1990: “Salinas de Gortari’s friend was not the owner of Telmex. If Southwestern Bell had not decided to contribute $72 million more to the group’s offer, the owner would have been Roberto Hernández. In other words, the privatization did not favor any friend of the president, but was won by an American businessman! Ed Whitacre III offered more money than the rest. The silence around this is deafening. And if you don’t believe me, you have one advantage: Mr. Whitacre is alive. He has invited many people to go and interview him, but no one has wanted to do so. Why? Because then their false tale about the government handing Telmex to Slim will fall to pieces.”
The day after my interview with Rogozinski, I requested an interview with Whitacre III. At the date of publishing this book, no response had arrived. And reading Rogozinski’s book, I found a table preceded by the following text:
The press never mentioned that American shareholders earned two dollars for each one that Slim received, nor did it pay too much attention to the composition of the share capital of Telmex by the end of the privatization process:
• 10%: Southwestern Bell
• 5.23%: 32 Mexican investors
• 5.17%: Carlos Slim
• 5%: France Telecom
• 4% reserved for the workers (50,000 people)
• 70.6% was in the New York and Mexico stock exchanges
Truth be told: Salinas’s “friend” was not the owner of Telmex.
