Luciano Pantano paid expenses and toll passes with an AFA card
Aguinsky warned that these movements must be urgently investigated in order to determine whether they are directly linked to the Pilar property and, if they constitute an ongoing crime, to order the immediate cessation of their effects. In that context, he indicated that the predicate offense of the alleged money laundering could fall under the category of fraudulent administration, to the detriment of AFA and through its directors.
The judicial investigation into the luxurious Villa Rosa mansion in Pilar has added a key piece of information that once again places the Argentine Football Association (AFA) at the center of the scene. Economic criminal court judge Marcelo Aguinsky revealed that the alleged front man for the property, Luciano Pantano, was using an AFA corporate credit card to cover monthly expenses of nearly 50 million pesos.
Pantano, a self-employed taxpayer and the formal owner of the mansion under investigation, appears to be linked to high-value expenditures that, according to the case file, were paid with an American Express card associated with an AFA corporate account. The statements were also sent to the association's headquarters on Viamonte Street at 1300, in the City of Buenos Aires.
In a ruling in which he refused to recuse himself from the case and send it to the Federal Court of Campana, Aguinsky maintained that the "epicenter" of the case is not the country house in Pilar but AFA itself, whose registered office is located in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. For the judge, the core of the maneuvers under analysis is concentrated there.
Among the detected expenditures are toll payments corresponding to several of the 54 high-end vehicles that were seized on the Villa Rosa property. The judge emphasized that these expenses are repeated month after month and average 50 million pesos between January and December 2025, a volume that is difficult to reconcile with the tax profile of the alleged front man.
The ruling also recalls that prosecutor Claudio Navas Rial linked this case to another ongoing investigation into alleged evasion of contributions and taxes by AFA, estimated at about 19 million pesos. That case is being handled in another court of the same jurisdiction, presided over by judge Diego Amarante, and for Aguinsky it "completes the body of circumstantial evidence" regarding the crimes that would have preceded the laundering maneuvers.
The judge also stressed that the Economic Criminal jurisdiction is the natural forum for this type of investigation, given its degree of technical complexity and its impact on the economic and financial order. For that reason, he rejected the territorial jurisdiction challenge promoted from Campana.
If judge Adrián González Charvay persists with the jurisdiction claim, the conflict will be solved by the Federal Chamber of San Martín. Meanwhile, the case will continue its course in Economic Criminal Court No. 10, with the January judicial recess lifted and AFA increasingly implicated in the case file.
