Word: parma
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...global consumer brand. In the past year, the story of Parmalat has emerged in fits and starts, as three teams of forensic accountants have combed through the company books and dozens of executives - including Tonna, Tanzi, Ferraris and Del Soldato - have made detailed confessions to magistrates in Parma and Milan. Using their testimonies and thousands of pages of official documents, it's now possible to piece together the key parts of the affair. Here's the inside story of how the Coca-Cola of milk managed to go sour. A CRUDE FORGERY For well over a decade, from about...
...people have been charged in Milan; more are expected to be charged in coming weeks by magistrates in Parma. Parmalat's losses are now officially put at €12 billion and its investors have lost another €14 billion - though the company's 33,000 employees have emerged relatively unscathed, as the firm continues to operate while in bankruptcy. Most of the money that moved in, around and out of the company has since been traced, although the final destination of some of it is still unknown. Tanzi has admitted transferring some €500 million to family firms, but investigators...
...Parmalat to go public in 1990, and plug some of the gaps in its accounts; at the time it had a market value of around €300 million. But as early as 1993, Parmalat allegedly began to invent financial transactions to pad its balance sheet. Investigators in Milan and Parma agree: if it hadn't cooked the books, Parmalat would have posted losses every year from 1990 to the end. Instead, it posted profits, masking its problems with a mixture of fictitious transactions and aggressive acquisition; starting in 1992, the group began snapping up dairy and other companies in Italy...
...food industry analyst in London, became the first big bank analyst to issue a "sell" recommendation on Parmalat stock; she found the accounts incomprehensible. Despite such misgivings, however, business continued as usual. Six months before the collapse, Kenneth Lewis, the chief executive of Bank of America, flew to Parma to pay a call on Tanzi. Ferraris recalls that the June 2003 meeting with Lewis was cordial. If the American had any concerns, he didn't raise them. "It was a marketing call," Ferraris recalls. "Lewis was saying, 'We'd love to do more business with you guys.'" The bank describes...
...answer is, emphatically, no. They say the deals were proper, and that Parmalat's dire reality was hidden from them. But Enrico Bondi, the Italian turnaround expert who in December was appointed Parmalat's bankruptcy commissioner, alleges that the answer is yes - and this month he filed suit in Parma's court against the two banks, claiming that both transactions were illegal under Italian bankruptcy law and should be revoked. Last month he filed suit in New Jersey against Citigroup, alleging that the American bank helped Parmalat's founder, Calisto Tanzi, and other insiders loot about $8 billion from...