Investigative magistrates yesterday grilled Mr Fausto Tonna, Parmalat's former chief financial officer, for a second day running, on the basis of documents seized from the offices of Mr Gian Paolo Zini, a long-serving lawyer for the bankrupt dairy group.
Sources close to the magistrates said Mr Tonna elaborated on the role played by banks - notably Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley - that underwrote more than a dozen bond issues and advised on numerous acquisitions during the past decade or more.
The sources also said Mr Tonna revealed the payment of bribes to unspecified politicians. People familiar with the company have said Parmalat regularly inflated the purchase price of acquisitions in Latin America in order to price in bribes.
Mr Zini is expected to be interrogated later in the week and could be forced into a direct face-to-face confrontation with Mr Tonna. Both are in prison in Parma.
Investigators are seeking to determine how much the banks knew about the finances of the company before it filed for bankruptcy protection on Christmas Eve and their discovery that an estimated €10 billion ($12.7 billion) was missing from its accounts.
Mr Tonna has claimed he was following orders from Mr Calisto Tanzi, Parmalat's founder and chairman, until forced out last month.
Separately in Milan, magistrates were expected to resume questioning of Mr Tanzi, imprisoned 10 days ago.
A person familiar with the probe said investigators were culling information from documents seized recently from Deloitte, the auditor for the consolidated accounts of Parmalat, and from Grant Thornton, auditor for several key subsidiaries of the group.
Regulators around the world are beginning to look at Parmalat's global network of subsidiaries as the group's cash crunch cuts off cash to those units.
Brazil's stock market regulator yesterday said it was reviewing the balance sheet of Parmalat's large subsidiary there, where a small number of shares are listed.
That comes one day after Dutch regulators said they were looking at how Parmalat's Netherlands subsidiaries issued €4.45 billion in bonds. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has been co-operating with its Italian counterpart for the past two weeks and filed suit in New York against Parmalat last week regarding possible fraud.
Grant Thornton's US business yesterday lost one of its big audit clients when Countrywide Financial, the biggest independent mortgage lender in the US, switched to KPMG.
Mr Stan Kurland, chief operating officer at Countrywide, said its decision to ditch Grant Thornton after 30 years had nothing to do with the Parmalat affair.
- (Additional reporting by Andrew Parker and Juliana Ratner in London. Financial Times Service)
