Italian investigators on the trail of more than 10 billion euros believed missing from the accounts of Parmalat questioned three former-finance directors and an internal auditor of the insolvent food group on Friday.
Pressure also increased on the Bank of Italy and a string of banks over their links to the crisis which prosecutors suspect involved more than a decade of fraud and false accounting.
Thousands of small investors have lost money while the livelihoods of milk farmers from Europe to South America and of Parmalat's 35,000 employees worldwide are also under threat.
PHOTO: AFP
Prosecutors first quizzed former chief financial officer (CFO) Luciano Del Soldato and internal auditor Gianfranco Bocchi, who is accused of faking bank accounts and other documents, in a jail in the city of Parma, a source close to the probe said.
"If anybody has taken money, whoever they are, we want to know about it," the source added.
A judicial source said another ex-CFO, Fausto Tonna, was also quizzed on Friday, the latest questioning he has undergone. Tonna and Bocchi were due to be taken to Parmalat's headquarters near Parma tomorrow to help reconstruct the group's accounts.
Ten people have been arrested in the case including Calisto Tanzi who founded Parmalat in 1961 and oversaw its breakneck expansion before it sought bankruptcy protection last month.
Parmatour, Tanzi's family-owned tourism group which he has admitted received part of 500 million euros siphoned out of Parmalat, and holding firm Coloniale, through which the Tanzis controlled some 51 percent of Parmalat, followed the food group into a fast-track bankruptcy protection procedure on Friday.
In Milan, magistrates grilled a third former Parmalat CFO Alberto Ferraris, a legal source said, adding that Ferraris, in an earlier session, had mentioned the role in the scandal of Bank of America's former head of corporate banking in Italy, Luca Sala.
Sala, who left Bank of America last year to become a Parmalat consultant, is one of at least 25 people under investigation. He has denied wrongdoing in the case.
Bank of America is one of seven non-Italian banks investigators have sought information from, a judicial source said on Thursday. Police have searched the bank's Milan offices and also taken documents from a Citigroup unit in the city.
Citigroup's lawyer met prosecutors in Milan on Friday and is preparing to present them with a file on the case, a legal source said. At least two similar meetings have taken place.
Swiss banking group UBS and Spain's Santander Central Hispano, which were both on the list of banks mentioned by the source, said on Friday they had not heard from Italian prosecutors.
"We have not been asked for any sort of information, either by judges, lawyers, police or any part of the [Italian] justice system," Santander said.
Investigators have uncovered just six million euros (US$7.6 million) of the missing money, according to judicial sources.
No charges have been brought so far in the case.
Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti on Thursday called for reforms of Italy's financial regulatory system and he singled out for criticism the Bank of Italy, which is governed by his long-time rival Antonio Fazio, for failing to protect investors.
The heat was turned up on Friday with newspapers reprinting details from nearly 20 letters sent by Tremonti to Fazio and deposited in parliament, asking about Parmalat's finances and those of smaller food group Cirio which collapsed in 2002.
Italian investigators were also checking nine boxes of documents seized by by US authorities from the New York home and office of Gian Paolo Zini, a lawyer who worked for Tanzi.
A judicial source said Anita Tanzi, wife of the jailed entrepreneur, made bank transfers of 700,000 euros after his arrest late last month but she was not under investigation.
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