Parmalat

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Parmalat

logo
legal form Corporation
ISIN IT0003826473
founding 1961

Start-up after bankruptcy in 2005

Seat ItalyItaly Italy , Collecchio ( PR )
management Yves Guérin ( CEO )
Number of employees 13,932
sales 4.491 billion euros (2011)
Branch Food
Website www.parmalat.net
As of December 31, 2011

Parmalat is an Italian food company that is one of Europe's largest dairy companies. The group of companies based in Collecchio near Parma had to file for bankruptcy in December 2003 and was managed by an insolvency administrator until October 2005. In 2011, Parmalat employed around 14,000 people worldwide and generated sales of 4.49 billion euros. Around 5000 Italian dairy farmers depend on the company as a bulk buyer. Parmalat shares have been listed on the Italian Stock Exchange since October 6, 2005 . In June 2011, Parmalat was taken over by the French dairy group Lactalis .

Company history

This article or section needs to be revised: The financial scandal should be incorporated as a subchapter of the story and needs to be updated; other events since 2008 are also missing, see also the discussion page.
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Parmalat in the world: blue locations, green licensees

In 1961, 22-year-old Calisto Tanzi opened a small dairy in Collecchio near Parma. Business was so good that he quickly expanded it to include the major cities of Genoa , Florence and Rome . Tanzi's company was the first dairy in Italy to fill the milk into the recently emerged beverage cartons instead of glass bottles . When the Swedish packaging manufacturer invented Tetra-Paks for ultra-high temperature beverages in 1965 , Tanzi was one of the first to use them. Further innovations such as the "functional food" vitamin C milk followed. The company soon became the market leader in Italy. It has been trading under the name Parmalat since 1968 and has been listed on the Milan Stock Exchange since 1973 .

Soon the company had grown into a multinational company that manufactured dairy products , beverages , pastries , soups and other foods.

expansion

In 2002, 57% of sales of 7.5 billion euros were based on fresh milk . The following expansion took place after the listing:

  • Expansion from six to thirty countries in Europe , Africa and Latin America since 1990
  • Football club FC Parma , run by Tanzi's son Stefano as president and board member at Parmalat
  • Parma Tour - tourism company (bankrupt, sold), led by Tanzi's daughter Francesca as CEO
  • TV program, Odeon TV (sold)

Financial fraud

Towards the end of 2003, one of the biggest corporate scandals in history came to light: Parmalat's balance sheet was missing eight billion euros.

In 1999 Parmalat had a subsidiary registered in the Cayman Islands under the company name Bonlat . Two years before the collapse, a manager of the food company is said to have revealed to the Italian cabaret artist Beppe Grillo that the group's debt has long exceeded its annual turnover. Grillo used this information for a sketch, which the public did not take seriously.

The financial problems first became apparent in early 2003 when the company tried to sell bonds worth € 500 million and Chief Financial Officer Fausto Tonna resigned in March 2003 (he was replaced by Alberto Ferraris).

The Italian stock exchange regulator Consob expressed suspicion of inconsistencies in the spring, whereupon Tanzi threatened to claim damages . Dairy farmers in Nicaragua and Collecchio in the province of Parma held Parmalat out for three to six months before paying for their deliveries. When the Italian cartel office asked Tanzi to sell three dairies, he bought them back through straw men.

The full scope of the debt became public in November, when dubious transactions with the Epicurum fund in the Cayman Islands became known and the Parmalat share fell dramatically on the stock exchanges. Ferraris resigned and was replaced by Luciano Del Soldato.

Del Soldato resigned in December when Parmalat, despite alleged liquidity of € 4.5 billion, was unable to requisition the cash from the Epicurum Fund, which it urgently needed for debt and due payments on a € 150 million bond. Enrico Bondi was called into the company as a restructuring engineer. Tanzi resigned as chairman and CEO. Parmalat's house bank, Bank of America , revealed that € 3.95 billion was a fictitious item on Bonlats' balance sheet. The sale of milk powder from Singapore to Cuba worth US $ 359 million turned out to be fictitious, as did the sale of a patent for ultra-high temperature milk worth US $ 90 million or the sale of the Santal fruit juice brand for US - $ 210 million

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi initiated fraud investigations and appointed Bondi to reorganize the company. Tanzi, once a symbol of unrestricted success, was arrested hours after the bankruptcy declaration and charged with financial fraud and money laundering . Even industry experts were surprised at how such balance sheet falsifications were possible despite auditing and banking supervision. So Parmalat sold z. B. even credit linked notes , in effect it placed a bid on its own creditworthiness to conjure up a fortune in thin air.

Together with Sergio Cragnotti from the insolvent Roman canning company Cirio and the media tsar Silvio Berlusconi, Tanzi was one of the economic greats of the 1990s. He embodied the dream of the self- made man who had turned nothing into an international corporation. The President made him a " knight of labor ". During his interrogation in the San Vittore prison in Milan, he confessed to having used funds of around € 500 million from Parmalat for Parmatour and other companies for purposes other than those intended. His football and tourism businesses turned out to be a financial disaster, as did Tanzi's attempt to compete with Berlusconi by buying Odeon TV - he had to sell the company with a loss of around € 45 million. Parmalat managers are said to have admitted to the Milan public prosecutor Francesco Greco, one of the investigators in the context of Mani pulite , that the balance sheets had been tweaked since 1988.

In 2004, the deficit determined by public prosecutors, auditors and bankers totaled € 23 billion. The Roman bank Capitalia , which was also involved in the insolvent Cirio, was missing € 1.5 billion, and the bank € 700 million of America; the German bank had a share of 5% of Parmalat. The Citigroup to an offshore company called "Buconero" ( Black Hole have invented) worth € 500 million.

Bondi filed a lawsuit against 45 banks. The public prosecutor's office started investigations against four of them: Citibank , Deutsche Bank , Morgan Stanley and UBS .

The first criminal trial began in Milan in September 2005. On June 5, 2006, another court case against 64 former managing directors and employees was opened in Parma. Among the defendants were Calisto Tanzi, his son Stefano and his brother Giovanni. The main proceedings should have opened on March 14, 2008, but were postponed to May 6, 2008 just a few minutes after they began; the main defendant Tanzi, who faced up to 15 years imprisonment, did not appear in court for health reasons. All 55 other defendants did not appear for the trial either.

In 2008 Calisto Tanzi was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and a payment of damages of 80,000 euros by a court in Milan . Seven defendants who stood with him in court were acquitted.

Sponsorship

From 1978 to 1984, the Parmalat Group was the main sponsor of the Brabham Formula 1 team , which had belonged to Bernie Ecclestone since 1972 . The multiple Formula 1 world champion Niki Lauda , who drove for Brabham from 1978, wore a red cap with the F-1 Parmalat Racing Team emblem when appearing in the press . He kept this cap after retiring from Formula 1 at the end of 1979. Even when he made his Formula 1 comeback at McLaren in 1982, Parmalat was seen again as one of the main sponsors on the helmet and in appearances on the cap. In 2002 Lauda announced that he would no longer wear the logo in the future.

See also

literature

  • Vittorio Malagutti: Buconero SpA - dentro il crac Parmalat
  • Günter Fritz: The Parmalat Scandal Orac, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-7015-0469-5
  • Arnaldo Mauri, La tutela del risparmio dopo i casi Argentina e Parmalat , Dipartimento di Economia, Management e Metodi quantitativi, Università degli Studi di Milano, WP n.8/2005. ideas.repec.org

Web links

Commons : Parmalat  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ parmalat.net: Investor Relations / Financial Data
  2. ^ Tanzi in court , n-tv.de
  3. ↑ Tages-Anzeiger : The process of the century should finally begin ( Memento of May 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) , March 13, 2008.
  4. ^ Corriere della Sera, March 14, 2008
  5. ^ Parmalat, 10 anni a Tanzi-Assolti gli altri imputati La Repubblica of December 18, 2008
  6. ↑ Ten years imprisonment for Tanzi, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung of December 20, 2008
  7. ↑ Mr. Lauda is topless again ( Memento from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive )