ParmalatParmalat was Italy’s best known food company. It had been established by Calisto Tanzi who in 1961, having inherited his father’s delicatessen, set up a dairy plant near Parma in northern Italy to challenge a then-existing Italian milk monopoly. Parmalat became Italy’s first producer of branded milk and greatly expanded its market through the production of UHT milk. It expanded strongly and by 2002 was the fourth-largest food products group in Europe. It had grown by gradually moving into new product lines and by making a large series of acquisitions, particularly abroad. At the end of 2002, the Parmalat group consisted of 213 companies in fifty countries and had 37,000 employees, of whom about 4,000 were in Italy. The shares of Parmalat Finanziaria, which controlled the industrial firm, were listed on the stock exchange in the 1990s. The company was well-known for sport sponsorships and had bought the Italian Serie A football club, Parma. Parmalat accompanied its strategy of expansion abroad with a large-scale interna- tionalisation of its financial operations. Acquisitions and investments were financed by entering into debt. Through various group companies Parmalat obtained very substantial financing on the international capital market. Despite the heavy indebtedness of the company, financial institutions and markets seemed happy with the acquisition strategy. At the beginning of 2003 Parmalat’s shares were brought into the index of the thirty largest companies listed on the Italian stock exchange. Many international financial analysts continued to advise investors to buy the company’s securities. However, by the beginning of the second week in December it had become clear that Parmalat would have difficulty meeting a debt repayment to a group of investors who had bought 18 per cent of Parmalat’s large Brazilian subsidiary but who had then exercised an option to sell it back to Parmalat following the failure of the subsidiary to be quoted on the Brazilian stock exchange. Parmalat claimed that it would be able to meet the payment by recovering a A500m ($590m) investment in a mysterious hedge fund in the Cayman Islands tax haven but the fund did not, in fact, exist. The company had been engaged in false accounting, the concealment of liabilities, the inflation of assets and the forging of bank statements. Parmalat had been using Enron-style accounting to hide liabilities
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