Mexican businessman Alonso Ancira, currently the largest shareholder of Mexican steel company Altos Hornos México (AHMSA), said other shareholders will soon include Cargill Capital, the Texas-based Kickapoo tribe, and Chinese businessmen willing to invest $1.0 billion over three years.
Ancira gave an interview to Corporativo Núcleo Radio Televisión (NTR) in Texas, where he discussed plans to reactivate AHMSA, which, due to liquidity problems, stopped producing steel since the beginning of the year and therefore also stopped paying part of its 14,000 workers. Ancira said he blames the current government for the liquidity crisis.
Until yesterday, the only reported investment or acquisition information was an agreement to sell the controlling share package of AHMSA to an investment fund based in New York, Argentem Creek Partners. However, Ancira clarified the situation.
Argentem is in charge of bringing together the investors and the owners of the capital to buy AHMSA are the US financial company Cargill Capital, Texan investors and Chinese investors, Ancira said.
“A business plan was presented with almost $1.0 billion of investment. It is not $250 million, it is $1.0 billion over three years, where a Chinese corporation also enters,” Ancira said in the interview, although he said he was not authorized to reveal the name of the Asian partner for the moment.
The name “of the corporation, I can give the name. Not yet,” he said, although he also emphasized that they are “the ones that will contribute the most investment.” It is capex (capital expenditures) for machinery, equipment, systems”.
The businessman said that AHMSA, as the steel industry installed in Mexico, benefits from the 25 percent tariffs decreed by the Mexican government on steel imports from countries with which Mexico does not have free trade agreements.
"I am not in charge (of AHMSA), the Chinese are experts in their area," he said. From this, it could be deduced that it will be the Chinese who will be the ones who will lead the integrated Mexican steel giant. Without going into details, due to the interruption of his interviewers, Ancira reiterated that AHMSA has great advantages of low iron ore and coke prices for having its own mines.
Ancira will cease to be the largest shareholder when the requirements established by Argentem Creek, on behalf of the investors, are met, including that AHMSA obtains an agreement with the federal government to extend a payment schedule for all debt commitments with the public administration federal.
SteelOrbis recently published that just taxes and the third payment of the Ancira-AHMSA reparation agreement to the state-owned Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) amount to $520 million (MXN 9,107 million). Ancira said that they want to pay the taxes in installments over a period of 4 or 5 years. The third payment to Pemex for $112.5 million, agreed to be paid next November, will be deferred until 2024.
Ancira said that if the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador accepts the investors' agreement, in two weeks the wages and salaries owed to a good part of the 14,000 workers will be paid. He also blamed the current government for the steelmaker's liquidity problems.
“For 31 years, I never failed. He never lacked (money) for his stripes (wages and salaries). It was from the entry of this government that we were attacked and flogged by the current federal government,” he said.
He also explained that the “reparation agreement (to Pemex) is based on the accusation that he never had… (they interrupted him). Nowhere am I sentenced guilty. The assertions that I sold a scrap fertilizer plant to Pemex were never proven.
“Right now, the problem (of AHMSA) is in the hands of the government. The president (of the Republic) said that they were going to help Altos Hornos de México, not Alonso Ancira because I am already out, the new owners with deadlines to pay taxes,” said Ancira.