Italian prosecutors grilled two former finance directors of Parmalat and a senior auditor yesterday in an effort to untangle an alleged multi-billion-euro web of fraud at the food group.
Amid increasingly intense questioning to locate hundreds of millions of euros believed to be held abroad, a lawyer defending Parmalat's disgraced founder denied there was any "treasure chest" to be found.
"There is no treasure, and this fact should be made clear," Michele Ributti told reporters outside Milan's San Vittore prison where Calisto Tanzi - until recently one of Italy's most powerful businessmen - is being held in a cell.
Also being held at San Vittore is the former head of Italian auditing firm Grant Thornton SpA, Lorenzo Penca, who underwent a first round of questioning since his arrest on Wednesday.
In Parma, another team of prosecutors heard Parmalat's ex-finance directors Fausto Tonna and Luciano Del Soldato - among a total of eight people now held - who are accused of carrying out systematic fraud by forging bank papers.
Mr Tanzi, 65, underwent a health check yesterday - he has previously suffered a heart attack - before facing more questioning today, judicial sources said.
He was recently quizzed for three consecutive days. Also in Milan, tax police confiscated a second set of documents from the Milan office of auditing giant Deloitte which was responsible for signing off on Parmalat's group accounts.
So far, Grant Thornton SpA - the Italian affiliate of the global Grant Thornton group - has faced most of the criticism for having certified the accounts of a Caymans Island unit at the centre of the scandal.
A lawyer for Penca and a partner in the Italian practice Maurizio Bianchi who has also been arrested told reporters both men continued to deny any wrongdoing.
"They had asked to be heard before their arrest warrants were issued and they had everything in order to answer questions without going through this ordeal," Salvatore Stivala said.
Prosecutors have said the auditors cooperated in and even helped devise the fraud at Parmalat.
No one has been charged in the case. Grant Thornton's US arm sought to distance itself from its Italian counterpart yesterday, denying any liability in the case and vowing to help uncover facts about the scandal.
"Within our power, we will ensure that what happened is uncovered and that the appropriate actions, no matter how severe, are taken," Chicago-based Grant Thornton LLP said in a statement.
Parmalat, known worldwide for its long-life milk, was declared insolvent two weeks ago after it revealed an accounting hole its former boss has recently said could total some eight billion euros.
Some attention is also turning to the bankers who helped fund Parmalat with loans and arranged an estimated eight billion euros in bond sales between 1997 and 2002.
Newspaper La Repubblica quoted a judge, Guido Piffer, as saying in a legal document that investigators needed to clarify "the role of the credit institutions which granted the group credit despite a precarious financial situation".
Parmalat's new government-appointed commission Enrico Bondi is due to meet with banks soon to ask for fresh credit lines believed to be worth more than 50 million euros.
Capitalia, Banca Intesa and Sanpaolo IMI are among Parmalat's top creditor banks.
Prosecutors believe Mr Tanzi, helped by an inner circle of advisers, falsified Parmalat accounts for years and embezzled more than 800 million euros, saddling the group with debts they estimate at 10 billion to 13 billion euros.
Mr Tanzi was seized six days ago in Milan and has since admitted to siphoning off about 500 million euros from the publicly-quoted group and putting it into family firms.
As prosecutors and Parmalat's new management team try to trace the missing money, one magistrate has said that a trip by Mr Tanzi to Ecuador shortly before his detention in Italy might have something to do with the disappearance.
Ecuadorian paper Hoy reported this week that three of the group's firms in Ecuador were being looked at by investigators.
Italian media reported yesterday that Parma's soccer team could be one of the first of Parmalat's assets to be sold by Mr Bondi as he seeks ways to bring in cash. But a source close to the matter said Parma did not require urgent attention.