Mexico’s Coppel Brothers Emerge With $16 Billion Fortune

Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 11/15/2012

Sinaloa

In 1970, Enrique Coppel Tamayo introduced a credit card that allowed his working-class customers to buy clothing and furniture at a handful of retail stores he owned in Culiacan, Mexico.

With Mexico’s economy rebounding from the 2009 recession, and unemployment declining, the country’s consumers have more cash to spend on household goods. Coppel’s department stores across the country give the poorer among them the chance to buy a sofa-bed or an iPhone in small payments over six to 18 months. The Coppel empire has expanded despite the surge in violence in their native state of Sinaloa, home to the cartel of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most-wanted druglord.

Read more…

PRD calls for interest rate regulation (in Spanish)

El Universal, 3/15/2009

Carlos Navarrete

The Senate leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, Carlos Navarrete Ruiz, called for financial institutions to moderate the interest rates they charge. If they fail to do so, he said, Congress will intervene.

He alleged that the Bank of Mexico and organisms such as the National Commission for the Protection and Defense of Users of Financial Services (CONDUSEF) tend to “take the side of bankers.” He added, “that is not their duty.”

Read more…