| Parmalat was ruined by double-entry bookkeeping and affiliated structures Italian law enforcement agencies discovered schemes through which the largest national food concern Parmalat inflated its assets. As a result of a lengthy investigation, it turned out that the activities of the bankrupt company in recent years involved so-called double accounting, when several invoices were issued for many goods. More than 30 distributors and several hundred supermarkets were involved in this scheme. According to Italian prosecutors, the use of double accounts allowed Parmalat to obtain loans worth about 4 billion euros from more than 40 Italian and about a dozen foreign banks.
The fake accounts were not immediately discovered - as Bloomberg reports, “law enforcement officials had to work hard before the tangle of fictitious schemes was even partially unraveled.” It turned out that most of the Italian distributors who worked with Parmalat were somehow affiliated with the concern. For example, the largest holding company AGIS Srl belongs to the Callisto Tanzi family, the founder of Parmalat and the author of many fictitious schemes. In early January, he admitted to stealing 500 million euros from the company’s accounts. According to his lawyer Fabio Belloni, the money was spent on developing another family business - the travel company Parmatour. Now, as we know, Mr. Tanzi is under arrest.
Detecting the practice of double counting is not the last task for Italian justice. The investigation will have to find out how openly fictitious schemes were used and remained undetected for a long time. Yesterday, the Milan prosecutor's office announced the start of a thorough audit of the activities of 20 bankers from various credit institutions. For now, their names are not disclosed in the interests of the investigation. The fact is that, speaking last Thursday at the court hearing, Mr. Tanzi named 30 participants in the fraud, including major bankers and political figures of the country. He accused them of receiving bribes from the concern in the form of legal transfers.
To understand this whole story, the court and the prosecutor's office will need a lot of time. The investigation places great hopes on the testimony of former financial director Fausto Tonna and top manager Gianfranco Bocchi. Today they will be taken under escort to Parmalat's headquarters in Collecchio, where they will provide investigators with missing files of email correspondence between company executives.
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Parmalat was declared bankrupt at the end of December last year after it was revealed that the Italian dairy giant's nearly $5 billion bank account was a sham. The latest audit carried out by the auditing company PricewaterhouseCoopers showed that the concern regularly inflated its profits. In the last nine months of last year alone, Parmalat management attributed $400 million to official income. At the same time, pre-tax profit was inflated almost twice as much as reported. According to the latest data, the company's total debt is 14.3 billion euros. Currently, 25 people are under investigation in the Parmalat case, 11 of whom have been arrested. Denis UVAROV |
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