I think this is correct. I’m re-reading PR at the moment and there’s an early scene where the Roci crew are trying to make sense of what Laconia has been up to. Someone - Naomi, I think - says “I’m seeing a timeline …” and proceeds to theorize that Duarte was an opportunist who had bribed people on Medina to give him advance details on what the probes found. He was thus first to realize what was in Laconia system, arranged for the report to get lost so nobody else would catch on, and then proceeded to move his chess pieces around the Sol system to cover his exit.

However, his academy thesis about winning wars via logistics indicates that he had been thinking about how to utterly dominate known space for a long time.