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Weiteres zum Zusammenbruch von Parmalt.


A lot of cooks involved in this Italian stew

Parmalat collapse will be felt worldwide

Saturday January 3, 2004
The Guardian

There is an absurdity to the Parmalat scandal that defies its categorisation as a typical Italian business scandal, albeit on a huge scale. Sure, all the
warnings were there: this was a family controlled combine, with strong political and establishment links, which owned a football club and had a strange habit of continuing to borrow money even though it purported to have large cash assets. How predictable, then, that when the going got tough its patriarchal founder Calisto Tanzi resorted to cooking the books.
But the sheer size and international spread of the business put this collapse in a category all of its own. By definition, the repercussions will be felt way beyond Italy's laughably lax financial and regulatory environment.

In Berlusconi's Italy there has been a wilful effort to decriminalise the offence of fraud. In essence, you cannot be guilty of crooked accounting if the company concerned is privately-owned; even if the entity is publicly-listed, the chaotic and under-funded system of regulation means that discovery and eventual prosecution remains remote.

Unless, of course, you are Mr Tanzi of Parmalat, and you have seemingly managed to make €8bn or more disappear.

But what of the others who dealt with Parmalat, who advised it, took their fees and yet noticed nothing wrong? Over the past eight or nine years, Parmalat has raised more than €7bn through the international capital markets. Some of the top banks in the world worked on those capital raisings, selling Parmalat paper to their investing clients. Indeed, about half the business was done by American banks, whose regulator - the securities and exchange commission - is now working with the Italian authorities.

How is it that certain classes of professionals - auditors, lawyers and investment bankers etc - are able to demand fabulous fees for their work, yet shoulder none of the responsibility when things go wrong? There are lots of questions here. The answers may take some time.

<ul> ~ A lot of cooks...</ul>