Word: italianity
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...bias in the workplace against women who interrupt their careers to have kids. Barbara Cavuto, 35, a Rome manager at an employment services company who's eight months pregnant with her first child, says combining family and career still doesn't seem like a realistic possibility for Italian women. "Turning 35 is just about the limit beyond which it becomes more difficult to have and raise children," she says. "My company is not uncaring, but in Italy you're either seen as ambitious or not. And having a child is seen as a sign that you're not." Amid...
...hard-charging executive like Alberto Ferraris, being named chief financial officer of a €7.6 billion company was a career-making moment - and he wasn't going to let a few nagging doubts stand in his way. Since the company was Parmalat, the Italian dairy-and-food conglomerate the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged with perpetrating "one of the largest and most brazen corporate financial frauds in history," and since Ferraris now faces charges of market rigging and issuing false information, he may wish he had heeded those doubts. But back in March 2003, he says, he knew...
...investors and its most reputable auditors. How did they miss the signals that the company was cheating? It's not an academic question: if Parmalat had gone bust in 1995, when it could no longer fill all its funding needs in Italy, it would have been a mid-sized Italian failure with debts of about €560 million. Instead, Parmalat took its warped finances global. By the time of the collapse eight years later, it owed its investors €14 billion. Bank of America alone, beginning in 1997, arranged $1.7 billion in financing through bonds and private placements...
...reversal of logic," says Vito Zincani, the chief investigating magistrate in Parma. Usually, companies take on debt to grow. But in Parmalat's case, "they had to grow to hide the debt." The core of the fraud was a system of double billing to Italian supermarkets and other retail customers. Simply put, by billing twice for the same shipment of merchandise, Parmalat could create the impression that its accounts receivable were much larger than they really were. One of the Parmalat executives who operated the scheme, Claudio Pessina, told Milan magistrates that as many as 300 people at Parmalat knew...
...company's receivables were packaged as debt instruments and sold to investors - and a retainer to advise Parmalat in the acquisition of Beatrice Foods in Canada, a transaction valued at $310 million. Ferraris also laid the groundwork for a complex financing scheme through a Delaware company called Buconero, the Italian for "black hole," which Citigroup set up for Parmalat in 1999. Buconero loaned a total of $137 million to a Swiss subsidiary of Parmalat that then distributed the money to other Parmalat companies. Buconero received a guaranteed return of almost 6%, plus a total of about $7 million in fees...