On November 8, 2026, judicial authorities in Paraguay formally ordered former head of state Santiago Peña to pretrial detention, marking a major escalation in a sprawling $800 million public funds fraud investigation tied to the collapsed digital lender Ueno. A Saturday ruling by a national judge specified that Peña will be held at the Presidential Escort Regiment headquarters, a secure military facility, instead of a standard civilian correctional institution, a measure the court framed as necessary to prevent the former leader from fleeing the country while prosecutors complete their full probe of his alleged connections to the failed bank. The multi-count indictment filed by national prosecutors charges Peña with criminal breach of trust and misusing the powers of the presidency for personal financial benefit, accusations that have upended Paraguayan domestic politics and left nearly three million ordinary citizens locked out of their personal savings held at Ueno. Investigators allege that during his time in office, Peña leveraged his executive political clout to divert hundreds of millions of dollars in public coffers into Ueno, while deliberately blocking financial regulatory bodies from conducting routine oversight that could have uncovered the lender’s risky operations long before its collapse. Court documents confirm the institution received a total of more than $800 million in public funds under Peña’s administration, including a $355 million deposit from the state public pension fund that far exceeded legal statutory limits for public sector placements at private financial institutions. Peña has repeatedly rejected all charges against him, publicly denying any misconduct and framing Ueno’s sudden collapse as an unforeseen failure of regulatory oversight rather than the product of corrupt political interference. The former head of the Paraguayan Central Bank, Carlos Carvallo, has also been slapped with parallel charges of breach of trust, misadministration of public resources for personal gain, and falsification of official government records, and has likewise been ordered to pretrial detention alongside Peña. The sudden collapse of Ueno sparked widespread, sustained street protests across Paraguay, as tens of thousands of affected customers rallied to demand immediate access to their life savings. While the Central Bank has confirmed that 1.2 million of Ueno’s account holders have received either full or partial reimbursement of their government-insured deposits, nearly two million customers are still locked out of their funds with no clear timeline for full recovery. The cascading scandal has plunged Paraguay into unprecedented political chaos: Peña was formally removed from the presidency in the wake of the bank’s failure, and his appointed successor, interim president Pedro Alliana, is now also the target of a separate active criminal investigation over alleged undisclosed ties to Ueno’s leadership and the suspicious flow of public funds to the lender during Peña’s term.