Allow me to summarize this guy's alibi:
"Those Bastards at Palmalat lied to us, the TOLD us they had money deposited in our bank!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Now if it had been a 15 dollar check we could have punched a button to see if the money was there, but you see, we were in the middle of a 2 billion dollar bond sale...no sense rocking the boat, ya know. :)))
Former U.S. bank exec says was tricked by Parmalat
Reuters, 01.10.04, 4:16 AM ET
MILAN, Jan 10 (Reuters) - A former Bank of America (nyse: BAC - news - people) executive being investigated in Parmalat's scandal was quoted as saying on Saturday he was tricked into doing business with the now insolvent food group and denied he rigged markets.
"Every day I curse the choice those mad men made in choosing the Bank of America for their games," Luca Sala, formerly the head of the U.S. bank's Italian corporate finance division, told newspaper La Repubblica in an interview.
"But when you have a client like Parmalat, which is bringing in all that money and has industries around the world, you don't exactly ask them to show you their bank statements," he said.
Sala -- who left Bank of America last year to work as a consultant for Parmalat -- is among 25 people under investigation in Milan, including Parmalat's founder and two former finance directors.
Prosecutors accuse the former top executives of constructing a web of shell companies and using forged documents, including bank statements, to cover up losses and divert cash away from publicly listed Parmalat.
They say the hole in Parmalat's accounts could surpass 10 billion euros ($12.8 billion), making it one of the world's biggest corporate scandals.
A Bank of America spokeswoman said in London on Friday the bank was cooperating fully with the inquiry.
In his interview with La Repubblica, Sala denied he worked with Parmalat representatives to support the price of the group's securities despite being aware of the state of its finances, as stated in a warrant for the search of Bank of America's offices in Milan on Friday.
"What is true is they tricked me. And it is true that I and the Bank of America (BofA) were defrauded," he told La Repubblica, adding he had documents to prove his innocence.
"For the time being all I can say is that in BofA everything is done in teams and what I was doing had the approval of my superiors," he was quoted as saying.
Italian police seized documents from the Bank of America's offices in Milan during a 10-hour search on Friday. No current Bank of America employees are targets of the investigation.
No one has been charged of crimes in the Parmalat case.
Investigators say Sala was linked to a $500 million Parmalat bond placed by Bank of America which is one of several foreign banks named in the case.
Deutsche Bank AG met Italian prosecutors last week over its role in underwriting a Parmalat bond sale in September. Sources in Germany familiar with the situation said another meeting might be called for "clarification of some points."
Prosecutors in the northern Italian town of Parma near Parmalat's headquarters began questioning on Saturday the former head of its unit in Venezuela and of a Cayman Islands company at the centre of the scandal.
Giovanni Bonici turned himself in to authorities on Friday, becoming the ninth person arrested in the probe that has seen Parmalat founder Calisto Tanzi and two outside auditors jailed.
Parmalat's crisis exploded last month after Bank of America declared as false a document purporting to show Parmalat's Cayman Island's unit Bonlat Financing Corp. had some four billion euros in cash and securities with the bank.
Authorities in Italy, the United States and Luxembourg have launched investigations into suspected crimes that Italian prosecutors say stretched back more than a decade.
Offshore units are at the heart of the case the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has called "one of the largest and most brazen corporate financial frauds in history." (US$1=0.78 euros)
Copyright 2004, Reuters News Service |
