Bank official helped up Parmalat shares

A Bank of America Corp official may have helped drive up shares of Parmalat Finanziaria SpA by 17% in late 1999 — their largest one-day gain ever — by encouraging Italy’s largest food company to describe $300 million in loans as a share sale, according to court testimony by the official and other documents obtained by Bloomberg News.

The documents show that Luca Sala, then head of Bank of America’s corporate finance team in Milan, helped draft a December 18, 1999, Parmalat press release that said the bank led a group of North American investors in buying an 18% stake in the dairy company’s main Brazilian unit.

The deal valued the unit at about $1.35 billion, or more than two-thirds of Parmalat’s total market value at the time.