Word: shells
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lugano, handed him an empty briefcase, and waited. About an hour later, Sala returned with the case filled with cash. By now Parmalat's true debts were too big to hide. The beginning of the end came in 1999, when Parmalat executives transferred the activities of the three shell companies to Bonlat, the Cayman Islands firm at the center of the fake Cuban milk scheme. By 2002, Bonlat's fictitious assets had grown so enormous - up to $8 billion - that the company had to invent a Cayman Islands-based investment fund called Epicurum to take over some of its fictitious...
...retailers. In a scheme that authorities charge was devised and executed by Tanzi, top managers, the firm's outside lawyer, Gian Paolo Zini, and two outside auditors, Maurizio Bianchi and Lorenzo Penca, it would then cook its books some more to make the debt vanish, by transferring it to shell companies based in offshore tax havens. (Zini, Bianchi and Penca deny any wrongdoing.) When the hole grew too large to hide, Tanzi, Tonna and the two auditors allegedly came up with Parmalat's most audacious invention: a bogus milk producer in Singapore that supposedly supplied 300,000 tons of nonexistent...
...billion went to the banks alone. By 1995, Tonna and others have told magistrates, the company was losing more than $300 million annually in Latin America alone. Parmalat decided to move some of its debt off the company's consolidated financial statements. It did so through three shell companies based in the Caribbean. These firms pretended to sell Parmalat products, and Parmalat would send them fake invoices and charge costs and fees to make the "sales" look legitimate. Then Parmalat would write out a credit note for the amount the subsidiaries supposedly owed it, and take that to banks...
With the help of former Parmalat executives, magistrates and forensic accountants have mapped out the system of double billing they say was at the heart of the firm's alleged fraud. They claim Parmalat secretly controlled 33 of the 104 distributors it employed in Italy through shell companies in the Netherlands Antilles. The company issued duplicate invoices and used the fictitious revenues as collateral for bank credits. It then shunted the debts into offshore, off-the-books companies. As a result, investigators say Parmalat was able to both inflate its revenues and give the appearance of reducing its debt. Here...
...several student organizations support her efforts. Abiola calls for divestment when the Nigerian military junta, which seized the country in 1993 and imprisoned Abiola’s father, hangs 11 activists, including Nobel Peace Prize nominee Ken Saro-Wiwa. Harvard keeps its holdings in Nigeria, including $35 million in Shell Oil, a participant in business with Nigeria’s military junta and a knowing pollutant in many countries in West Africa...