World Surveillance Group Inc (fka WSGI)

[Peeb]

Mexico's richest: CARLOS SLIM HELU

http://www.vdare.com/awall/060510_memo.htm

Carlos Slim (see photo here), also known as "Rey Midas" and "El Ingeniero" [the engineer] is a telecommunications magnate, owner of Telmex, America Movil, CompUsa, WorldCom and plenty of other holdings, including Latin American subsidiaries of Verizon. Of Slim’s 30 billion dollar net worth, just last year he accumulated $6 billion of it.

Carlos himself didn’t start out poor. His Lebanese-immigrant family (original surname Salim) became rich buying up Mexico City properties after the Mexican Revolution.

By the time of the much-acclaimed privatization (a.k.a. crony capitalism) policy of the Carlos Salinas administration (1988-1994), Slim was in position to purchase Mexico’s state telephone monopoly, Teléfonos de México—Telmex.

So Telmex was converted from a state monopoly to a private monopoly. It still controls 94 percent of all the fixed telephone lines in Mexico. Slim also has 80 percent of the mobile phone market.

Mexican free-market economist Silvia Luna explains what Telmex offers the Mexican telephone-user:

"Today Mexico faces the highest telephone charges in the Western Hemisphere and Telmex customers pay the highest telephone charge of the 30 countries of the OECD…"

"We Mexicans pay charges three times higher than the cell-phone users of Sweden and Denmark, which negatively affects the country’s competitiveness, while political influences block everyone who promotes competition." [Carlos Slim y su monopolio perfecto, Cato Institute, April 17th, 2006]

But the world’s third-richest man is still coming out ahead!