Word: tanzi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...either an idiot or a megalomaniac, but I believe this company still has value." CALISTO TANZI, deposed founder and former executive of Italian dairy giant Parmalat, during a police interrogation into the alleged fraud that left the company with debts of nearly $17 billion...
Talk about sins of the father being visited upon the children. For the past two months, Parmalat founder Calisto Tanzi has been in prison on charges that he drove the Italian dairy giant into a €14 billion hole with a complex web of fraud and deception. His daughter Francesca and son Stefano expressed shock at what their devoutly religious father was said to have done. Prosecutors painted a different family portrait last week when the two Tanzi children were arrested on charges of fraudulent bankruptcy and criminal association. Prosecutors contend that Calisto Tanzi's two oldest children, each with...
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...
...prompting calls for more reform in a country famous for family entrepreneurs and infamous for the chaotic structure of their companies. The latter keeps the taxman at bay, but it's one reason Italian companies have had difficulty attracting foreign capital. Parmalat was supposed to be different. Tanzi got his start in business as a 21-year-old, when his father died and he took over the family's small prosciutto-ham factory. On a trip to Sweden, he noticed milk packaged in cartons and brought the concept to Italy. Later he adopted a process for making shelf-stable, nonrefrigerated...
Shortly before his arrest, Tanzi and his wife visited Fatima, the Portuguese town to which Catholics make pilgrimages seeking miraculous interventions. His trip symbolized the pious Tanzi that Parma natives know. Indeed, upon his arrival at San Vittore prison in Milan, one of the first things Tanzi did was attend a prison Mass. He had better keep praying, because he may need a miracle to extricate himself and his company from the mess they are in. --With reporting by Jeff Israely/Parma