Welcome to Off The Fence – Britain’s Only Newsletter. In news that will delight our beleaguered proprietor, we only have 70 copies of Issue 7 remaining for purchase through the webstore. Pick up yours while you can, because at this rate, the shelf will be empty when we join you again in a fortnight.
In the past, we’ve focused on London life here, so we’re delighted to bring our first investigation away from the UK – a deep-dive into the corporate corruption of the Mexican elite.
La Mafia del Poder
When International Netherlands Group (ING), the Dutch insurance conglomerate, entered Mexico in the late 80s it had lofty goals. Things looked good, times were changing, The President – who, incidentally, shot and killed his nanny as a child – was promising to privatise the country into growth after a financially ruinous decade. Throughout the 90s Mexico’s future oligarchs were being made.
Among them was Ricardo Salinas Pliego (no relation), a scion of a family famous for Elektra, its consumer credit driven stores. In 1993, Salinas Pliego got into TV. He bought Imevisión – a sleepy government-owned broadcaster – and turned it into TV Azteca, Mexico’s second largest media company. He made a fortune. Little did ING know that they were soon to cross paths with the newly minted media mogul, courtesy of a notoriously sleazy businessman named Fabio Massimo Covarrubias.
Fabio, whose gruff voice and back-pat-swagger belied a long history of dubious dealings, was a major shareholder of a fertiliser company called Fertinal, whose assets were insured by ING Mexico. The company was near bankruptcy, its plants were in dire need of maintenance, but as luck would have it one of those plants was hit by a hurricane.
So Fertinal filed a claim with their upstanding European insurers – a claim big enough to cover the value of most of their fertiliser plants, according to those with knowledge of the transaction.
As expected, the claim was denied. But Fabio saw an opportunity. He convinced a judge in the small resort town of Cuernavaca – once home to Erich Fromm and the Shah of Iran – to file criminal complaints against 21 of the company’s executives, including the head of marketing. As a result, most of them were forced into hiding for nearly two years. Meanwhile, the lawsuits dragged on. Facing mounting losses, ING sought to settle the Fertinal case.
Roughly a year later, the company began getting a lot of bad press. Indeed, TV Azteca seemed to be on a mission to destroy the Dutch firm’s reputation. You would turn on the TV to find scathing reports of widows mercilessly swindled by their European insurer, ING. It was a constant assault against the cruel Dutch menace, their orange lion mascot looming in the background of countless testimonials. Soon after, the ING sold off its Mexican business and left the country for good.
How could this have happened when everything seemed to be going so well? Mr Salinas Pliego, the hero of our story, had gotten involved.
One day in 2007, a federal senator contacted ING’s Mexican executives and delivered a message: either you pay Fertinal tens of millions of dollars, or be prepared to face a ‘media and legal war beyond all previous dimensions’. The Fence spoke to someone employed by ING at the time with knowledge of the case. ‘This is like testifying about the Cosa Nostra,’ they said before explicitly asking for anonymity.
To those within ING what happened was obvious – the company was at its wits’ end and willing to settle for an exorbitant fee. But as the settlement came to a close, gruff-voiced, swaggering Fabio – whose definitely lawful activities were very expensive because they were very lawful – ran out of money.
Fortunately, he was able to find financing from TV magnate Mr Salinas Pliego. Using a painfully complicated transaction that involved a government agency and several Belgian shell companies, Pliego bought a stake in the essentially bankrupt fertiliser company. It was at this point that Salinas Pliego’s political lackey, without a writ from the helpful judge from Cuernavaca, or any legal claim, knocked on the door and demanded tens of millions of dollars. In fact, the senator had no legal connection to Fertinal whatsoever.
Our source described the shock of the international executives, who were completely unaccustomed to this level of overt extortion, never mind experiencing it from a man whose main money maker was selling overpriced toasters – on credit. They could see the team in Mexico struggling to do some cultural translation with the international executives. ‘I mean imagine explaining to some Dutchmen that a judge in Cuernavaca – I mean what?! why!? – is charging their executives with crimes. It was a very culturally complicated process.’
Shocked, ING left Mexico despite insuring seven million people, investing three billion dollars and employing thousands.
It wasn’t the first time Salinas Pliego pulled something like this off. At the time he was being investigated by both Mexican and American regulators. He had allegedly defrauded stockholders of a public telecommunications company and therefore couldn’t set foot on US soil. In Mexico he was also embroiled in a dispute with the country’s National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV).
Sources tell The Fence that while this spat was ongoing, a commissioner received a videotape of their children leaving school. At one point, the wife of an official was accosted by black SUVs in Mexico City’s version of the M25 ring road, El Periférico.
Salinas Pliego was just getting started. He orchestrated a series of loans exceeding 500 million dollars from his own bank, Banco Azteca, by artificially inflating the value of Fertinal’s assets – which at their fair value would have rendered the company ineligible for any bank loan.
He then sold Fertinal to Mexico’s state oil company, Pemex, for 635 million dollars, neatly liquidating the debt he had incurred with himself. As a bonus, he added an eminently fair 200-million-dollar premium to the transaction. After all, Fertinal had a full 12,000 dollars in its coffers and many, many tons of shit in its silos.
The transaction was likely as lucrative as it was because the head of Pemex at the time, Emilio Lozoya, allegedly accepted millions in kickbacks. (Lozoya is now on house arrest.) To this day, Mr Salinas Pliego denies having a stake in Fertinal beyond the loans given to it by his bank, despite the half dozen media reports corroborating his equity stake in the firm.
Like Taylor Swift, Salinas Pliego knows how to reinvent himself for the times. At the time of writing, he is the second richest man in Mexico and the right-hand billionaire of the current President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
AMLO, as Obrador is known, campaigned on the promise to end corruption and fight back against Mexico’s powers-that-be, who he refers to La Mafia del Poder, ‘The mafia of power’. And Salinas Pliego is now more indispensable than ever. In a closed tender process, his company Banco Azteca won the contract to distribute all of AMLO’s direct cash transfers – the backbone of his progressive policy agenda.
Just last week, as I stood in a Banco Azteca branch among a huddle of people waiting for a teller, I saw an advert attacking the country’s electoral regulatory body – AMLO’s political pariah ahead of the June legislative elections. The outcome of that election is anyone’s guess, but the Mafia del Poder seems set to stay as powerful as ever.
Press, Pause
Like everyone else in the London mediaworld, we’ve heard rumours of ‘private issues’ concerning one of the government’s leading figures. What we’ve also heard is this: a major broadsheet spiked an investigation into this story at the very last minute.
‘The Joy of Bullying’
Over the last three weeks, we’ve asked journalists in the UK, Ireland and America to wing us the worst pitch they’ve ever sent. Yesterday, we published our compendium of cringe. We’re now under pressure to commission some of the not-so-terrible pitches, though in all honesty, we’d much rather do a little piece on the specific typology of hack who all assured us they’ve never sent a bad pitch (those of a ‘literary sensibility’: yes, we’re talking about you).
Il Miglior Fabbro
Peter Hitchens always surprises you. From his fan-girling for Lindsay Lohan vehicle Mean Girls, to his studied poses with North Korean soldiers, the Mail on Sunday pin-up lives to titillate his readers. What can you expect next? Sometimes, he just writes a lucid and well-researched article, as he does here on the passing of Shirley Williams, and the beloved illusions of the more privileged parts of the Labour Party.
Break A Leg
Patrick Marber’s revival of Travesties at the Menier Chocolate Factory. The NT’s production of Translations in 2018. Mark Strong in A View from the Bridge at the Young Vic. Denise Gough in People, Places & Things. More than a year into the pandemic, we can only remember the electric thrill of London theatre at its best. But we try, perhaps, to forget the many, many dismal shows – the cramped seats, wine in plastic cups, and the infuriating sensation that you, the consumer, have been completely ripped off.
As the industry readies itself for a re-opening later this summer, our theatreworld insider writes on what could be – and should be – different among the gilded barns of the West End.
Sesh Gremz
Shrugging off defeat in the Hartlepool by-election, our youth correspondent, Sir Keir Starmer, looks ahead to his summer of festivals in Amsterdam, Croatia and Belgium, and shares his tips on how to keep the vibes positive until the autumn sitting. (There’s a reason the lads down at the Crown Prosecution Service call him the ‘Resident Advisor’.)
The Sage Speaks
It’s rare that an interview prompts so much excitement at The Fence, but this past week saw one so long-awaited, many wondered if it would ever arrive, as John Swartzwelder was interviewed by the New Yorker’s Mike Sacks.
Swartzwelder is not a household name, but his work is arguably some of the most popular, and consistently quoted, comedy of the past fifty years. The man who masterminded many of The Simpsons’ best Golden Age episodes, including ‘Bart The General’, ‘Homer At The Bat’, ‘Bart Gets An Elephant’ and ‘Krusty Gets Cancelled’ – along with 55 others – is generally regarded as the secret sauce behind the leftfield, galaxy-brain hilarity of the show’s imperious, 90s pomp.
Swartzwelder is famously private, never granting interviews or taking part in the Simpsons’ DVD commentaries – save for one 90 second appearance which saw him being called at home by the other writers – so to score an interview with him was no mean feat. That it then proved to be one of the most informative, riveting and just damn funny interviews we’ve ever read, is more than we could have dreamed. Few blocks of text have ever swerved so effortlessly between stupid jokes and excellent writing advice, while weaving in so much fascinating personal history.
We spoke with author Mike Sacks – himself no comedic slouch – who told us how he took down the great white whale of American comedy.
TF: Swartzwelder is a hero for comedy fans, but is almost completely unknown to 99% of the people who continually quote his work, even decades later. Can you speak a little about your relationship with him, his work, and why you think he's so important?
Well, my relationship is only through email. We're not drinking buddies, sadly. Would love to down a Duff or five with him someday. He is a huge baseball fan, as am I, and he supposedly gets together with friends and other writers to play, sometimes even renting out professional stadiums. I can't tell you how much I would love to do that. So maybe that'll happen. As far as his work, he's what Jim Downey of Saturday Night Live calls ‘The Babe Ruth of The Simpsons.’
The Simpsons has produced, in my opinion, some of the best comedy of the past century. So, to be personally responsible for such a high level of humour, with 59 episodes under his belt, I can't think of many other comedy writers who have done as much – or nearly as much – to contribute to comedy than John.
He thinks differently from those who are already thinking differently, other comedy writers. So, in a sense, he's three layers removed from the normal person. His mind is a wonder.
He's notoriously elusive, how on earth did you get him to talk to you on the record, and give you so much gold? Did he ever object to anything being used, or go dark for periods of time?
I asked him in 2008 or so if he'd participate in my first book of interviews, And Here's the Kicker. He very politely said no. I then asked again a few years later for my second book of interviews, Poking a Dead Frog. Again, he very politely declined. He's very polite.
When I asked again, it was for the New Yorker. Truthfully, I think that that's what made the difference for him, as he's a huge fan of the magazine and he grew up reading and being influenced by their wonderful humourists. I think it was the New Yorker name more than anything else that made him say yes this time.
It reads unlike any interview we've ever read, at times it's like a written script: did these pithy koans come out just like that or was there a lot that hit the cutting room floor?
It took place over the course of a little over one month, all by email. Typically, when I conduct interviews, they are over the phone or a combination of phone and emails. But I actually do like email interviews. These are writers I'm typically interviewing. This is their strength. Most writers are terrible talkers but wonderful at expressing themselves through the written word.
As for this particular interview, there were some questions John didn't want to answer. So he didn't. He just said ‘I'd rather not answer,’ which is of course perfectly fine. There were also one or two sets of questions and answers that were eventually cut entirely out of the piece so the interview wouldn't run too long. But as far as what you see, these answers are exactly as he wrote them the first time. There were no requests for him to rewrite something to make it more clear or for him to add extra information in a follow-up question.
His responses came fully formed and perfect. He's a brilliant writer. And he gave me what I needed – and then some.
In Case You Missed It
Whatever happened with that jewellery designer and the PPE? GQ shines up this uncut gem of a story.
Brad Stone excerpts his new book Amazon Unbound for Bloomberg, with this mind-boggling trip through the ‘brutal, brilliant efficiency’ of Bezos under the kosh.
Every wonder how the sun-specific rituals of religions like Islam and Judaism fare at the Earth’s poles, or on board the International Space Station? You needn’t any more.
Not for the first time, Belgium becomes the centre of attempts to redraw the map of Europe.
And may we be the 6,000th organ to point you toward this intriguing article regarding Bill Gates’ marital arrangements, from a 1997 profile in TIME magazine.
And Finally
During lockdown, our editorial WhatsApp group buzzed with lots of inert ‘haha!’s as we laboured to make the magazine lonely at our laptops. Now that we can meet IRL, allow us to share a video that reduced all to hysterics last Monday.
Pete Price is a radio DJ in Liverpool, and not much loved in that city for his reputed Tory sympathies. As such, he is the victim of a sustained campaign of prank calls from his listeners, of which this pearl is perhaps the finest, most ridiculous example.
*
A cordial reminder that our print magazine is the only meaningful source of income for us, and that you can buy a copy in the link below. You can get in touch with us, as ever, by replying to this email, and if you have anything you would like to pass onto our writers, you can do so here.
All the best,
TF
We are also delighted to offer a subscription service. For £25 you will receive all four copies of the magazine per year, delivered to your door.
