PASFIN S.A.E.C.A.

—

What it is

PASFIN was founded in 2011 to serve small and medium-sized businesses that struggled to access fast financing through the traditional banking system, offering innovative and non-traditional products. Its flagship product was factoring — a contract by which a company transfers its unpaid invoices and receives the cash immediately.

A second product was the fideicomiso de garantía (guarantee trust), and the company’s core objective was to provide immediate working capital to improve the financial structure of SMEs. PASFIN was registered as a Sociedad Emisora de Capital Abierto — a publicly-listed company — under CNV Resolution No. 45 E/15 dated 25 August 2015, giving it the right to issue securities on the Paraguayan market.

Who owns it

Carlos Oleñik Memmel served as president of PASFIN and was the face of the company through at least 2019, representing it in international financing agreements. Oleñik later became the subject of criminal proceedings, with prosecutors alleging his involvement in money-laundering activity in the “Pavo Real I” case.

In August 2020, Credicentro — controlled by the Grupo Vázquez — absorbed PASFIN as part of a merger process. This was the first triple merger ever completed in Paraguay.

Credicentro itself had been founded in 1984 by the Vázquez family and became a joint-stock company in 1994. After the merger, Grupo Vázquez controlled the combined entity with 49.09% of the equity and 86.26% of the votes.

Who runs it

PASFIN as an independent entity has had no management since August 2020. Its obligations and operations were inherited by Credicentro, which in 2020 merged strategically with PASFIN S.A.E.C.A.

and LCR S.A.E.C.A., and by end-2022 changed its corporate name to Ueno Holding S.A.E.C.A. Ueno Holding credits the group’s founding to Victor Vázquez, who is cited as the company’s founder and guiding figure.

Not published: the names of PASFIN’s board of directors at the time of the merger were not found in the public filings of the CNV/Superintendencia de Valores or the BVPASA — the exchange’s company-level filing page was inaccessible during research. Paraguay’s securities law requires listed companies to publish board composition in their annual filings, but PASFIN’s standalone registry entry was closed upon absorption and its final board minutes are not posted publicly.

The money, in plain words

Not published: standalone revenue, net profit, total assets, and equity for PASFIN S.A.E.C.A. were not located in any publicly accessible filing from the Bolsa de Valores y Productos de Asunción, the Bolsa de Valores de Asunción, or the Superintendencia de Valores (successor to the CNV) — the three primary sources examined.

Paraguay’s securities regulations require listed S.A.E.C.A. companies to file periodic financial statements, but PASFIN’s public registry was closed upon absorption before those filings became retrievable.

In January 2019, PASFIN signed an agreement with Frontera Capital Group to channel US$5 million in five-year debt and US$2 million in preferred equity — a combined US$7 million — into its SME lending book. This is the only externally verified financing figure for the standalone entity.

A bond series (Series 4) issued under PASFIN’s own emission program had a face value of Gs. 7,500,000,000 (≈ US$1.2 million at the current rate of 1 USD = 6,061.49 PYG, our calculation), authorised by Board Resolution No. 586 of 14 July 2020 — just weeks before the merger closed.

What it is doing now

PASFIN no longer operates. Its outstanding bond obligations — totalling Gs.

60,000 million (~US$9.9 million, our calculation) — were inherited by the successor entity through the triple merger and are being amortised on their original schedules. The successor, Ueno Holding, has since transformed from a credit house into a corporate investment holding.

In 2025, Ueno Holding itself announced its intention to be absorbed by its controlling shareholder, Grupo Vázquez S.A.E. — a second layer of consolidation that will erase the last formal remnant of the PASFIN lineage from Paraguay’s public markets.

What to watch

• The pending merger of Ueno Holding into Grupo Vázquez S.A.E. (announced 2025) will determine whether PASFIN’s former bondholders — still owed roughly Gs. 84,517 million (~US$13.9 million, our calculation) across several bond programmes — receive timely repayment.
• The ongoing criminal proceedings involving PASFIN’s former president Carlos Oleñik Memmel, who prosecutors allege acted as a front man for narcotics-linked financial flows, remain a reputational overhang for anyone tracing the corporate lineage.
• Paraguay’s securities regulator now operates as the Superintendencia de Valores under the Banco Central del Paraguay; disclosure standards for S.A.E.C.A. companies have been strengthened since 2024 and will determine what future transparency the successor group must maintain.
• The Bolsa de Valores de Asunción has itself modernised its trading infrastructure with Nasdaq technology in January 2026 — any future re-listing activity in the Grupo Vázquez ecosystem will occur in a more transparent market than the one PASFIN entered in 2015.

—

This is news, not investment advice.