He Secretary of Finance and Public Credit, Arturo Herrera, rejected this Wednesday, December 30, a controversial reform bill to the Bank of Mexico law (Banxico) that would endanger the autonomy of the issuing entity by forcing it to buy foreign currency that commercial banks cannot enter into Finance system.
Proponents of the bill, approved by the Senate in early December, argued that it would help Mexicans with limited access to the financial system, such as migrant families and hotel workers, who are paid in dollars.
“The only thing this proposal was going to do is transfer the problem that these commercial banks had to the central bank, because the central bank would have had the same problem: how to export these dollars,” Herrera told Reuters in an interview at its offices.
Following approval in the Senate, the legislators of the Chamber of Deputies They agreed to review and postpone discussion of the initiative.
Herrera said that 99.3% of remittances came to Mexico through formal financial channels.
“If it is a problem of 0.7%, it is a problem that we can solve through operational mechanisms (…) and it does not necessarily involve making a change to the Bank of Mexico law,” the official considered.
The governor of the central bank, Alejandro Diaz de Leon, had warned that the bill could force the entity to absorb money from drug cartels and tarnish its name before international authorities, as well as threaten its autonomy.