Judge indicts two former Parmalat auditors
Two former auditors at Parmalat were ordered to stand trial today for market rigging – the first indictments since the massive fraud scandal at the Italian dairy giant.
Maurizio Bianchi and Lorenzo Penca, both worked at the Grant Thornton firm’s former Italian office.
London-based Grant Thornton International expelled the Italy branch after the two officials were implicated in the scandal.
The decision by Judge Cesare Tacconi was made during a closed-door preliminary hearing in Milan that marks the beginning of the judicial process over who is to blame for the Parmalat scandal.
Prosecutors were trying to convince a judge to order trials for 29 people, ranging from the dairy giant’s founder to former company financial officers and accountants.
Parmalat’s founder and former chief executive Calisto Tanzi was not in court.
The multinational’s acknowledgement in December that it didn’t have the £2.8bn (€4bn) it had claimed was in a Bank of America account stunned the business world. It was the first indication of the extent of the scandal, which the US Securities and Exchange Commission has called “one of the most brazen corporate frauds in history”.
Shortly after the first revelations, Parmalat, once held up as a model of enterprising, family-run Italian companies, went into bankruptcy protection. An audit during the early days of the probe put the company’s debt at £10bn (€14.5bn), eight times higher than the company claimed in its accounts.
