Two former Parmalat financial directors, two of its accountants and an unspecified number of Grant Thornton auditors have been arrested in connection with the dairy group's collapse.
The ex-CFOs are Fausto Tonna and Luciano Del Soldato and the accountants are Gianfranco Bocchi and Claudio Pessina, news agency ANSA
reported.
The arrests were made by the police on the orders of Parma's investigating magistrates.
The company's boss, Calisto Tanzi, was arrested at the weekend. He has denied responsibility for covering up an €8 billion hole in the company's accounts, but he has admitted diverting €500m from Parmalat's funds to finance other parts of the business.
Grant Thornton was Parmalat's primary auditor between 1990 and 1999 but the US company continued to be the auditor of Parmalat's Cayman Island based Bonlat.
The Grant Thornton executives are suspected of helping Parmalat to falsify its results by providing legal and financial advice. Early today, the head of San Paolo IMI went to be interviewed by magistrates in Parma as someone 'with knowledge of the facts' a status which does not mean that he is being investigated.
ANSA also said that investigators of the US Securities and Exchange Commission have reached Parma and are due to meet local public prosecutors in the Parmalat case. The SEC has accused Parmalat of fraud for filing misleading financial statements during 2002 and 2003.
In a civil suit filed in a New York court, the regulator alleged that Parmalat 'engaged in one of the largest and most brazen corporate financial frauds in history'.
This scandal emerged on December 19th when the group said Bank of America rejected the authenticity of documents saying that Bonlat had a bank account holding $3.950 billion December 31, 2002.
