The former head of Italian food conglomerate Parmalat was sentenced to 18 years in prison and ordered to pay huge sanctions on Thursday after a massive fraud trial on a case dubbed “Europe’s Enron.”
Calisto Tanzi, 72, was not in court for the sentencing and has only served nine months between prison and house arrest since the spectacular collapse in 2003 of a company that he founded in 1961 and operated in 30 countries.
The court in Parmalat’s home town of Parma in northern Italy said Tanzi and other former executives sentenced with him will have to pay 2 billion euros (US$2.6 billion) back to the company, which has emerged from bankruptcy.
PHOTO: AFP
They will also have to compensate the 30,000 defrauded investors who were plaintiffs in the trial with around 30 million euros — a figure dismissed as “very disappointing” by one of the investors who attended the hearing.
Tanzi was sentenced along with 14 other former managers of Parmalat.
The prosecution had sought a 20-year sentence for Tanzi, but prosecutor Gerardo Laguardia said he was “fully satisfied” with the verdict.
Tanzi’s defense lawyer Giampiero Biancolella said his client was “not expecting such a severe sentence” and would appeal the verdict.
Tanzi has already been sentenced in a separate trial in Milan to 10 years in prison for stock market manipulation and an upcoming appeals hearing will decide whether or not he will serve time for that sentence.
Earlier rulings found that he was too old to go to prison, but the prosecution warned he could use hidden funds to flee Italy.
Reports at the time showed pictures of the luxurious villa complex near Parma in which he was living and described an extensive art collection including paintings by Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne that he had hidden away.
The Parmalat scandal seven years ago destroyed the savings of some 135,000 people, left a gaping 14 billion euro hole in the company’s finances and ruined the image of one of Italy’s leading business empires.
Among the 17 defendants who were on trial, Parmalat’s former financial director Fausto Tonna was also sentenced to 14 years in prison and Tanzi’s brother Giovanni got 10-and-a-half years. Two men were acquitted.
At the time of its collapse, Parmalat employed around 36,000 people and was a major player on the international stage.
Its many subsidiaries included the Parma soccer club and a tourism unit.
It now has around 14,000 employees in 15 countries including Australia, Canada, South Africa and in South America.
Parmalat was restructured and re-listed on the Milan stock exchange in 2005.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS