Sheinbaum Says Ex-INE Chief Córdova Ignored Election Contract Ring
Sheinbaum accused former INE head Lorenzo Córdova of tolerating a group of firms that won more than 2 billion pesos in election contracts. What was found.
President Claudia Sheinbaum said Friday that people who rallied behind the slogan “el INE no se toca” (hands off the INE) during Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government were shielding what she called an “electoral mafia.” She spoke at her morning press conference, a day after the federal government presented an investigation into companies that won election contracts worth more than 2 billion pesos.
Sheinbaum aimed most of her criticism at Lorenzo Córdova, who led the Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE, Mexico’s National Electoral Institute) from 2014 to 2023. She asked the INE’s current board to clean up how it buys election materials and services, according to Animal Político.
What the government’s investigation found
Raquel Buenrostro, head of the Secretaría Anticorrupción y Buen Gobierno (the federal anti-corruption ministry), presented the findings on Thursday. Her office said a network of companies run by the brothers José Alfredo and Raymundo Hernández Casillas has won contracts with election authorities for 27 years.
Between 2014 and 2023, the firms obtained more than 2 billion pesos in contracts with 23 of the 32 Organismos Públicos Locales Electorales (OPLEs, the state election bodies), Buenrostro said. In 2024 and 2025 they won another 646 million pesos from 15 state bodies. The companies named include Formas Finas y Materiales, Cajas Graf, Cerlaz de México, Corporativo SEC and Formas Finas Fernando Fernández.
Using public transparency records and the historic Compranet procurement database, investigators described alleged fake competition in tenders. Buenrostro said the related companies bid in the same procedures and allegedly agreed in advance which one would offer the lowest price. Some firms reported no employees or technical capacity, while others shared addresses, phone numbers and family ties among their partners and legal representatives. Payments from public contracts were then moved to other companies, which made the final beneficiaries hard to trace, according to the investigation.
Auditors map ties to INE staff
A separate review by the Auditoría Superior de la Federación (ASF, the federal audit office), released Thursday, found 89 connections between seven companies and 83 people tied to the INE, including partners, board members and legal representatives. One former INE employee, assigned to the office of the presidency, also held legal power to represent Corporativo ZEG.
The ASF said some related firms submitted separate bids in tender LP-INE-001/2025, which bought ballot boxes, voting screens and ink markers for the judicial election and was decided on Feb. 7, 2025. It also reported 21.3 million pesos in transactions involving providers whose e-invoice certifications had been revoked. The auditors said the overlaps alone do not prove bid rigging and that no final responsibility has been established.
The case against Córdova
Córdova recently acknowledged that the INE’s General Council named Guadalupe Taddei president of the Sonora state election body in 2014 and that he knew a small group of suppliers dominated OPLE contracts. Sheinbaum said he knew about this for nine years and did nothing, while the INE also hired the same firms. She also named Edmundo Jacobo Molina, the INE’s executive secretary for 15 years, saying he must have known too.
She pointed out that Córdova, Jacobo Molina and Marco Antonio Baños now belong to the Somos party, as does Juan Carlos Padilla Aguilar, a former government supervisor of the Hernández Casillas brothers. Sheinbaum said any administrative or criminal liability is for the competent authorities to decide, not the executive branch.
She blamed the 2014 electoral reform under Enrique Peña Nieto for giving the INE’s 11 councillors the power to appoint state election officials in all 32 states, a job that state legislatures used to do.
What it means for voters and election costs
Sheinbaum said an election year costs around 37 billion pesos and that part of that spending may be inflated by the contracting schemes under investigation. She asked the INE’s current 10 councillors, the board left after Taddei’s departure, to make contracting fully transparent, write rules that state election bodies also adopt, and lower the amounts spent on elections.
Source: grupoanimal.mx
