Word: parmalat
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From Milan boardrooms to Parma dairy farms, Calisto Tanzi was long viewed as a model Italian entrepreneur--modest, hardworking and, above all, generous. Over four decades, as he built Parmalat, the food company he founded in Parma in 1961, into a worldwide giant with annual sales of $9.6 billion, he showered the town with his philanthropy. A pious Catholic, Tanzi helped pay for a major restoration of Parma's 11th century basilica. He poured cash into the local pro-soccer team, restored the theater and financed programs for the poor, AIDS patients and drug addicts. "He has got that impulse...
...that Tanzi might have had some far less noble impulses too. On Dec. 27, Tanzi was arrested, and he is confined in a Milan jail while Italian prosecutors, joined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, probe his role in an alleged $8.8 billion fraud that could implicate Parmalat in Europe's biggest corporate scandal ever, easily on a par with those of Enron and WorldCom in the U.S. Parmalat has filed for bankruptcy, and corporate-turnaround expert Enrico Bondi is trying to salvage what he can of the firm, which has 36,000 employees in 30 countries, including...
Prosecutors allege that Parmalat created an elaborate house of milk cartons, using opaque subsidiaries (including one called Buconero, which means "black hole") in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg to hide the declining state of its finances. Tanzi has reportedly admitted shifting some $630 million from the company to other businesses but insists some underlings devised the accounting fraud. Former chief financial officer Fausto Tonna has given prosecutors crucial details about the firm's labyrinthine bookkeeping...
...Parmalat unraveled quickly--and seemingly out of nowhere--after it had trouble meeting a routine bond-interest payment in November, prompting tougher scrutiny of its books by Italian regulators and its own auditors. A follow-up audit produced a stunner: an account held by the company at Bank of America in New York City that supposedly contained about $5 billion turned out not to exist. All the paperwork, including written confirmation from the bank to Parmalat's auditors, had been forged, Bank of America said. "What is shocking here is that it appears the assets were just plain fabricated," says...
...wasn't such an amateurish fraud detected earlier? Grant Thornton, Parmalat's primary auditor for most of the 1990s and still auditor of some of its subsidiaries, initially said it too had been duped. But on New Year's Eve, Grant Thornton suspended the head of its Italian affiliate and another partner after the two were arrested as part of the investigation. The men have denied any wrongdoing...