Santiago Pando Soldati plays polo, is the nephew of businessman Santiago Soldati and cousin of La Dolfina star, Adolfo Cambiaso. He was born at the intersection of two surnames that in Argentina mean money, countryside and relationships. These relationships are useful for many things, even for unholy businesses, and this week a court case was revealed that has him in the sights of the San Isidro prosecutor, Fernando Domínguez. For the prosecutor, Pando operated in the shadows as an intermediary between a company and Arsat officials to win a tender.
The case gained notoriety because, after a series of raids, Justice found in the house of the former president of Arsat, Facundo Leal, more than 2 million dollars, cocaine, other typical electronic party drugs and espionage equipment.
It all started on January 4, 2024, when Arsat employees discovered that fifteen containers stored in a warehouse in San Fernando were missing copper pieces and internal components of fiber optic equipment used to bring high-speed internet to the entire country. The warehouse was operated by the ALS company. The security cameras did not work and the perimeter electric fence had been cut for some time. What seemed like theft from a rogue employee turned out to be something else. As the case progressed, the investigation expanded because signs of corruption appeared in the hiring of the logistics company that guarded the property. At this point Pando’s role begins to be outlined.
The file defines him as a “private actor who operated as an intermediary between both sectors” and as the “hinge figure in the link between administrative decision-makers and contractors.” The first documented contact dates back to November 1, 2020: that day, Pando wrote to Diego Padilla to tell him to urgently call purchasing manager Gerardo Boschin. About 72 hours later, Padilla appeared before Boschin as an ALS representative. There was still no call for bids, no enabling administrative act. For researchers, the business began with WhatsApp.
What followed was a chain of messages that the prosecutor reconstructed one by one, where Pando played an active role as a messenger between both parties. Even in April 2021, when the offer for an Arsat equipment deposit service had already been presented, Pando told the company that “something needs to be corrected” that they “requested” from Arsat.
There are more compromising phrases between Pando and Padilla. “Look at how much it allows you to increase so that we have something nice. It’s a five-year business. Draw it out,” Pando wrote, proposing to inflate the budget to generate a better return. Boschin, deputy manager of Purchasing and Contracting at Arsat during the administration of Alberto Fernández, would have been a key person in the tender. According to the case, he leaked the internal status of the file to the businessmen and signed purchase orders for a total of 1,930,861 dollars and 40,300,000 pesos in direct hiring between 2021 and 2024. Pando, always according to the file, was the link between Boschin and the directors of ALS.
The three offers from the supposed competitors –ALS, Transportes Padilla and Tradelog– arrived on September 10, 2021 within minutes of each other. The investigation established that Transportes Padilla was the employer of the vice president of ALS. The competition was theater. The prosecutor requested an investigation for ten people. One of them is Pando, accused of fraudulent administration to the detriment of the State and bribery and gifts. He is accused not only of having facilitated the scheme but of having been compensated with economic benefits for his intervention and there are even photos of him on the cell phones of those investigated where he can be seen in the Arsat offices.
DRUGS. Before he was taken into custody, Facundo Leal, the former president of Arsat, asked why he was being raided. The answer left him disconcerted. It was that complaint that he himself had made in January 2024 for the theft of equipment at the San Fernando warehouse. The file that began looking for whether any unfaithful employee stole things from work ended up coming back like a boomerang.
The research did not have this as its original objective. Nor did he have drug trafficking or cash as a working hypothesis. What motivated the case was an investigation originally launched into the theft of high-value technological equipment belonging to Arsat, which fell in the federal court of San Isidro in charge of Lino Mirabelli and in the prosecutor’s office of Fernando Domínguez. When investigators moved on to the contracts with ALS and the security of the warehouse, the obvious question was who had signed them. The clue forced investigators to look inside Arsat again.
The proceedings, carried out between May 24 and 28, included fifteen raids on properties in Buenos Aires and Mendoza. In total, 2.5 million dollars in banknotes, large sums in other currencies, drugs such as ketamine and MDMA crystal, cell phones, laptop computers and abundant documentation were collected.
Leal presided over Arsat, the state company that manages critical telecommunications infrastructure and satellite services, from 2022 to 2024. Then, he was appointed in 2025 by Javier Milei’s government to head ORSNA, the body that regulates and supervises the national airport system.
Pablo Gastón Pagani, Leal’s brother-in-law, was Deputy Finance Manager and was the one who signed the extension of the logistics firm’s contract without the intervention of the board of directors. The case has a collective name within the file: “The Mendoza gang”, as a group of officials from that province was known within the company.
What began as a theft of cables ended up uncovering a hiring scheme directed in WhatsApp chats. At the center of all this – without position or signature – is Santiago Pando Soldati: an intermediary who connected two worlds and was left, according to his chat, “with something nice.”
