Italian prosecutors widened the Parmalat fraud investigation yesterday to two partners of auditors Deloitte and a former Bank of America executive, while Luxembourg added a new dimension with a money-laundering probe.
Italy's market watchdog Consob said it would look into bond and share price moves after lawyers for a group of Parmalat creditors said they had traced $7.7 billion of the insolvent food group's missing money.
A media report that the money had been found - which the lawyers acknowledged they could not prove and Parmalat could not confirm - sent shares of several Italian banks surging.
Auditors fired
Parmalat was declared insolvent last month after disclosing a hole in its accounts that investigators say could exceed 10 billion euros ($12.7 billion) - making it what US regulators called one of the world's biggest corporate fraud scandals.
Public prosecutors in both Milan and the northern city of Parma are investigating a range of suspected crimes including fraud, market rigging and false accounting.
Magistrates in Milan yesterday raised the number of people targeted in the probe to 25, putting two partners of the Italian affiliate of auditors Deloitte & Touche - Giuseppe Rovelli and Adolfo Mamoli - under investigation, a judicial source said.
Mamoli signed off on Parmalat's accounts in 1999, 2000 and 2001, while Rovelli signed off on accounts for 2002 and was working on 2003.
Parmalat announced yesterday it had removed Deloitte as the auditor of its group accounts, one day after it fired Grant Thornton SpA as auditors of the offshore books at the centre of the scandal.
Milan prosecutors also extended the probe to Luca Sala, who had worked for Bank of America until several months ago, when he became a Parmalat consultant, the judicial source said.
Deloitte in the United States said it was unaware the partners were being investigated. Bank of America declined to comment on Luca Sala.
Authorities have already arrested eight, including two Grant Thornton SpA executives as well as Parmalat's disgraced founder Calisto Tanzi, who oversaw its 42-year aggressive expansion.
Tanzi has admitted to siphoning 500 million euros out of the company into other parts of his financial empire.