Parmalat audit chief quits

The head of auditing firm Grant Thornton’s Italian unit has resigned and his partner has been suspended indefinitely following their detentions in the Parmalat scandal on fraud accusations, the company said.

Lorenzo Penca, chairman of Grant Thornton, and his partner Maurizio Bianchi, were detained along with five other Parmalat officials and lawyers yesterday on suspicion they helped contribute to the company’s bankruptcy through false accounting and fraud.

Grant Thornton International said in a statement that it had accepted the resignation of Penca as chairman of its Italian firm and that Bianchi had been suspended indefinitely.

Grant Thornton served as Parmalat’s auditor from 1990-99.

Parmalat, Italy’s eighth-largest company, has acknowledged a multi-billion pound hole in its balance sheet and filed for bankruptcy protection from its creditors.

The case has been compared to the collapse of US energy trader Enron because both companies used a network of related companies to hide losses.

The company’s jailed founder, Calisto Tanzi, has put the size of the hole in its finances at €8.5bn, and has also admitted that he shifted €567m from Parmalat’s coffers to loss-making travel businesses controlled by his family.

One of the judges overseeing the case, Guido Savini, accused Penca and Bianchi of having falsely certified Parmalat’s balance sheets and of having suggested the “fictitious operations necessary to achieve the fraudulent aims of the group”.