Astris Finance is very pleased to announce that Santiago Pardo has joined its team as Managing Director based in Bogotá, Colombia.
Santiago will head the Colombia office of Astris Finance. In Colombia, the firm has been working on the government’s road concession program known as 4G for the past three years, and is also involved in conventional and renewable energy, oil and gas, and in the port sector. Santiago will also strengthen Astris’s presence in the Andean region, and particularly in Peru where Astris has been one of the leading infrastructure and energy advisors in the past years.
Over the past 20 years, Santiago Pardo has acquired a unique blend of infrastructure finance experience, encompassing both the corporate perspective and the banking perspective. He has developed very strong expertise in project finance, debt capital markets, M&A, project development, and private equity. His industry track record spans oil & gas, infrastructure, power, and mining.
Santiago began his career at Citibank Colombia in 1991, moving to New York in 1997 where he worked for 11 years with Citi’s Infrastructure and Energy Finance Group, including 6 years as head of the Latin America team. During this time, he was directly responsible for closing over 20 transactions in 12 different countries in the Americas, raising over USD 8 billion in funding from multiple sources.
Santiago moved back to Colombia in 2008, where he transitioned to the corporate side, serving as Project Finance Director for Reficar, an Ecopetrol-developed refinery project, then as Managing Director for Infrastructure and Energy at Abacus Capital, a local asset manager; from 2011 to 2014, he was CFO of TGI, the largest natural gas pipeline company in Colombia; and most recently (2014-2016), he served as CFO of La Luna Resources, an E&P company developing conventional and unconventional resources in Colombia. For these last two roles, he was selected as CFO by the major private equity investors backing these companies. At TGI, he personally led the refinancing of TGI’s USD 1,125 million debt in the international capital markets, and assisted CVCI in their successful exit of their investment in TGI for USD 880 million.
Santiago holds an MBA (with distinction) from the Johnson School at Cornell University, as well as a B.S. in economics from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. He is fluent in English and Spanish, and conversational in Portuguese.
