A stream of lawyers representing thousands of Parmalat investors lined up in a Milan courthouse this morning to take part in the first instalment of a multi-part, pre-trial hearing.

The court will determine whether and how Parmalat founder Mr Calisto Tanzi should be brought to trial along with more than two dozen former company officers, consultants and ex-auditors, as well as three financial institutions.

Former Grant Thornton auditors Mr Lorenzo Penca and Mr Maurizio Bianchi were granted their request for an accelerated trial, a process that skips directly to deliberations over innocence or guilt, and reduces any eventual sentence. Their trial is scheduled for January 27, said a legal source.

Today's closed hearing was devoted to investors' applications to become civil parties to the market-rigging case, a status that will let them seek compensation from any guilty parties.

"We have an avalanche of documents to present. There are people who lost everything. Our hope is to get something back for them," said Mr Claudio Coratella, a lawyer representing about 500 investors through the consumer group Codacons. He only presented a portion of his clients' claims today, and will file more at the next instalment of the hearing on October 29.

The pre-trial hearing has been broken into a series of sessions scheduled to run until early December due to the number of parties involved and the complexity of the case.

Individual investors with armloads of documents but no legal representation argued heatedly with security as they were turned away at the entrance. Many appeared to be of retirement age.

Mrs Amalia Saberio, a 64-year- old housewife from Milan, was seeking to salvage her life savings. "I lost €78,000, everything that I had," said Mrs Saberio, "My husband and I are living on €600 a month. I've had insomnia for a year."

Parmalat's government-appointed administrator, Enrico Bondi, also filed to be a civil party, as have a number of consumer groups, and Italy's market regulatory body Consob.