Parmalat buys a second-rate football club -- Parma -- and turns it into a European winner. Tanzi puts his son in charge. "Don Calisto" is said to fund the renovation of churches and to ferry politicians and prelates in company aircraft.
But behind this facade, in the last decade Tanzi and a few key managers allegedly invent accounts and assets.
And they create documents to clothe the fiction in order to cover poor performance and to divert funds, into a failing local travel company, Parmatour, controlled by his daughter, for example.
And with this world of make-believe they fool banks and auditors, -- until bond payments fall due and financial entities with such names as Bonlat, Epicurum or Buconero -- black hole in English -- are revealed as the top of a bottomless pit.
The company's telephone manager turns out to have been the titular head of about 30 companies. Investigators say that each time they open a set of books they find more nasty surprises.
Many shocking but colorful European corporate frauds of the last 25 years come to mind: the Maxwell pension fund fraud and the collapse of Barings bank in Britain, for example.
One of the strangest was the collapse of the Italian Banco Ambrosiano in the early 1980s with links to an alleged right-wing political plot and separately to the Vatican.
The mafia is suspected of having murdered one key figure, and a close associate banker died in prison after drinking poisoned coffee.
However, the Parmalat affair, "one of the largest and most brazen financial frauds in history" in the words of US regulators, stands out because it is bizarre, reaches into many countries and seems certain to change regulatory thinking.
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