Word: parma
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Emmanuel Stroobant, chef of Singaporean popular restaurant Saint Pierre, serves a signature wok-fried foie gras with tetaki of Japanese squid, julienne of Parma ham with warm yogurt jelly and black peppercorn reduction. But ask him if he is a fusion chef, and he balks. "I guess I am," he says, "but I don't like the word fusion...
...financial failure made all the more dramatic by the fact that the company had established itself as a recognized global brand. In the past year three teams of forensic accountants have combed through the company's books, and dozens of executives have made detailed confessions to magistrates in Parma and Milan. Using documents obtained by TIME, it's possible to piece together the inside story of how the company that wanted to be the Coca-Cola of milk went sour...
...reverse merger with a dormant holding company listed on the Milan stock exchange and followed up with a big capital increase. That enabled Parmalat to go public in 1990 and plug some of the gaps in its accounts. As early as 1993, according to evidence given to magistrates in Parma, Parmalat allegedly began to play fast and loose with its balance sheet. Starting in 1992, the group began buying up dairy and other companies in Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Hungary and the U.S. "It was a reversal of logic," says Vito Zincani, the chief investigating magistrate in Parma. Usually, companies take...
...collapsed, Joanna Speed, Merrill Lynch's food-industry analyst in London, issued a "sell" recommendation on Parmalat stock. She found the accounts incomprehensible. Yet as late as 2003, Bank of America was still trying to woo Parmalat. In June, Kenneth Lewis, the bank's then chief executive, flew to Parma to see Tanzi. Ferraris recalls that the meeting with Lewis was cordial; he encouraged Parmalat to use the bank's services. "It was a marketing call," Ferraris recalls. "Lewis was saying, we'd love to do more business with you guys." The bank describes the visit as "a courtesy call...
...being shipped from Singapore, of all places. And nobody challenged a key discrepancy: the amount of debt disclosed on the firm's balance sheet was at odds, by as much as $2.6 billion, with the corporate data on file at the Italian central bank. In a submission to the Parma bankruptcy court on Nov. 1, Citigroup said it "did not know of Parmalat's real financial condition from the Bank of Italy Risk Register, Bloomberg, or at all. It was lied to repeatedly by Parmalat...