Word: scandalizer
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This was the first revelation in the scandal that turned Parmalat into Europe's Enron, a morass of fraud and 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...
With hindsight, it's hard to understand why the scandal didn't come to light sooner. Parmalat never publicly explained why it needed to continue borrowing money when its accounts claimed it was sitting on billions of dollars in cash. Nobody appears to have asked whether Cubans really needed $1.3 billion worth of milk powder--enough to supply everyone on the island with 60 gallons a year--and why the powder was 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...
Barry Bonds is a contact hitter who seems on his way to eclipsing Hank Aaron's career home-run record of 755. But it is Bonds' confirmed contact with illegal steroids that sent runners into motion last week to confront the biggest drug scandal in baseball history. Suddenly the most open secret in the sport was out, and it implicated baseball's biggest star and the titanic records he had accumulated. "I will leave no stone unturned in accomplishing our goal of zero tolerance by the start of spring training," vowed Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig in New York...
...baritone always manages to convey a sense of imperturbable gravitas. Yet his calm must have been sorely tested last week when the U.N. Secretary-General learned more about the latest trouble lapping at his door. Annan had gathered a few top aides at a private site to discuss the scandal over the U.N.'s management of the oil-for-food program during the reign of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. In the middle of the discussion, a staff member's cell phone rang with unsettling news: another story was about to break, this one about suspicious payments to Annan...
...conservatives have alternately denounced or dismissed the international body for its inefficiency and bias. Their view of the U.N. sank to new lows after the Security Council refused to authorize the invasion of Iraq. But nothing has done more to tarnish U.N. credibility than the metastasizing oil-for-food scandal, which has grown from a fringe obsession among conservative ideologues to the subject of five separate congressional investigations. All this has trained the hot lights on Annan, a second-term Secretary- General and Nobel Peace laureate who finds himself fighting to defend his office in the face of a small...