By Jorge Schmidt, Legal Schmidt PLLC · Published June 13, 2026
Ricardo Salinas Pliego, a Mexican billionaire and founder of Grupo Salinas, found himself at the center of a sophisticated financial scheme that spanned continents. In 2021, Salinas wanted to fund a roughly $400 million bet on Bitcoin without selling his underlying shares. To do so, he entered into a stock-backed loan — borrowing cash against shares pledged as collateral — with a lender calling itself Astor Asset Management 3 Ltd. The lender claimed ties to the famous Astor family of New York and accepted approximately 7.2 million Grupo Elektra shares, worth more than $400 million, as collateral.
The arrangement, however, was allegedly a fraud. Rather than holding the shares as collateral, the lender secretly sold them. Salinas was handed a portion of the proceeds, but the money was dressed up as a new loan from the lender itself. Salinas later described the deception as "the perfect fraud." The accused is Vladimir "Val" Sklarov, who allegedly operated under aliases such as "Gregory Mitchell." U.S. prosecutors allege Sklarov duped Salinas out of about $450 million. Sklarov was indicted in the Southern District of New York and arrested in May 2026.
While Sklarov faces criminal charges in the United States, Salinas is pursuing civil remedies in the English High Court. This is where the cross-border evidence problem arises. The shares were sold and the proceeds moved through U.S. financial institutions, scattering the money trail across borders. To trace those funds and prove the fraud, Salinas needed records held by banks and intermediaries located in the United States. Traditional channels of international judicial assistance are often slow and narrow. Instead, Salinas turned to a powerful and frequently underused U.S. statute: 28 U.S.C. § 1782.
Section 1782 is a gateway for litigants in foreign proceedings to obtain evidence located in the United States. The statute allows a party to — or an interested person in — a proceeding before a foreign or international tribunal to apply to a U.S. federal district court for an order compelling the production of documents or the giving of testimony, for use in the foreign case.
The framework was clarified by the Supreme Court in Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., 542 U.S. 241 (2004), which treated § 1782 as a tool for international cooperation designed to lower the barriers to exchanging evidence between the U.S. and other nations. To come within the statute, an applicant must satisfy three requirements:
The Intel decision added two clarifications that expand the statute's reach. First, the foreign proceeding need not be pending or even imminent; it need only be "within reasonable contemplation," which lets applicants gather evidence early in a dispute. Second, there is no requirement that the evidence sought would itself be discoverable under the law of the foreign forum.
Satisfying those requirements does not guarantee discovery, however. The district court retains broad discretion, guided by four factors drawn from Intel:
Salinas and his corporate vehicle were claimants in the English Action, so they qualified as "interested persons" under § 1782. To prove the fraud and trace the movement of the money, Salinas needed to see what happened to the proceeds from the sold Elektra shares — and those records sat with banks and intermediaries in the United States.
Salinas's team filed an application in the Southern District of New York and subpoenaed four U.S.-based parties. Crucially, none of them was Sklarov or a company he controlled; they were banks and financial intermediaries. This is the textbook application of § 1782: the targets were nonparticipants in the English Action, located in the United States, which puts the first Intel factor squarely in favor of discovery.
The court granted the application in 2024. Salinas's side obtained thousands of pages of records from those U.S. parties, some produced under a protective order to preserve confidentiality. That discovery was vital to building the case in London and following the flow of funds Sklarov allegedly controlled.
The story took a procedural turn when Sklarov tried to interfere with the use of that evidence. Appearing as a proposed intervenor, Sklarov asked the Southern District of New York to enjoin Salinas's side from using the § 1782 discovery in an English contempt proceeding and in other foreign actions, arguing that a protective order entered during discovery barred such use.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan denied the injunction in In re Pliego, No. 1:24-mc-00394 (LAK), 2026 WL 1099060 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 21, 2026). The reasoning was straightforward and reinforced the broad utility of § 1782. The order granting the discovery had never restricted how the records could be used. A protective order, the court noted, does not reach the same information when a bank produces it on its own without designating it confidential. And the English contempt application was part of the existing English Action, so using the records there fell well within bounds.
In denying the injunction, Judge Kaplan quoted the Second Circuit's decision in Accent Delight Int'l Ltd. v. Adelson, 869 F.3d 121 (2d Cir. 2017):
"Section 1782 does not prevent an applicant who lawfully has obtained discovery under the statute with respect to one foreign proceeding from using the discovery elsewhere unless the district court orders otherwise."
The ruling confirms that once discovery is lawfully obtained under § 1782, it can travel — into asset tracing, contempt applications, and parallel proceedings in other countries — provided the issuing court has not explicitly restricted its use.
For applicants and foreign counsel, In re Pliego highlights how much § 1782 can do when evidence or money trails run through the United States. It is one of the most effective tools for reaching U.S.-based evidence that would otherwise be hard to obtain, and the discovery it produces can be leveraged across multiple proceedings unless the issuing court restricts its use. Build that leverage into the strategy from the start, and think early about how U.S. evidence can support parallel actions or enforcement efforts abroad.
For respondents and targets, the ruling is a warning. If you want to limit how § 1782 material is used, you must secure an explicit use restriction written into the order. Neither the statute nor a boilerplate protective order will do it for you. Trying to claw the materials back after the fact — as Sklarov learned here — is an uphill fight. Targets are far better served by negotiating the scope and permitted use of discovery during the application phase than by relying on implicit assumptions about confidentiality.
The intersection of U.S. discovery law and foreign litigation is intricate, but § 1782 offers a clear path to critical evidence. In re Pliego shows that the statute is not merely a document-gathering mechanism but a strategic instrument that can shape outcomes in foreign courts. For anyone litigating across borders, understanding both the statutory framework and the discretion U.S. judges exercise is essential.
Jorge Schmidt (Legal Schmidt PLLC, Miami) advises foreign counsel and litigants on bringing and defending Section 1782 applications. For a deeper treatment of the procedure and strategy, see A Practical Guide to Bringing and Defending Section 1782 Applications.