Documents on Parmalat's Cayman companies go missing in New York

Monday, February 9, 2004

NEW YORK, USA: Documents related to Bonlat, the Parmalat subsidiary based in the Cayman Islands which falsely claimed to have US$4.9 billion in a Bank of America account, as well as paperwork relating to Epicurum, which Parmalat last November claimed was a Cayman Islands mutual fund in which it had invested $600 million, may have been removed from the offices of Zini & Associates in New York or destroyed prior to a search by investigators.

According to the Financial Times, when the Manhattan District Attorney raided the offices of Zini & Associates on New Year's Eve with a search and seizure order, investigators feared that Parmalat's Italian-American law firm might have already removed many documents and files from its computer.

Earlier that day in Italy, Gian Paolo Zini, the firm's founder, had been imprisoned along with Parmalat founder Calisto Tanzi and other executives of the dairy group. 

According to several employees of Zini & Associates in New York - most of whom were fired two weeks ago - there was good reason to worry that crucial documents had been removed from there.

Cartons of documents were being removed by the trolleyload in the weeks before the raid, the employees say, prompting the Park Avenue building's doorman to ask one Zini executive if something was amiss.

The employees also suspected that the firm might have removed evidence on the computers.

Among the files to which employees were unable to gain access were those related to Bonlat, the Parmalat subsidiary based in the Cayman Islands and Parmalat executives in Italy have since admitted destroying Bonlat files there.

Around mid-December, key computer files were removed from the main server at Zini and placed on a new server set up and controlled by its New York office manager and IT manager. "All of a sudden nobody could work. Everything people were working on had been removed," said one former employee. The documents removed or destroyed may have included paperwork relating to a Cayman Islands mutual fund called Epicurum.

Zini registered the fund through Maples and Calder in the Cayman Islands, but Epicurum acted only as an escrow account through which moved Parmalat-related transactions, many of which were based on fake intercompany credits.

In a series of interviews with former employees - all of whom requested anonymity - it emerges that Zini's New York, Milan and Rome offices were a legal factory to produce documents and manage offshore transactions for Parmalat.

Zini was Parmalat's principal lawyer in the US. When the DA's office arrived on December 31, it had a search warrant only for the 21st floor of the two-floor offices at 460 Park Avenue, one of New York's more expensive addresses.

The firm's computer servers were on the floor below, although people familiar with the probe said the DA had been able to access the entire system during that visit. Nevertheless, the DA needed another warrant to return to the 20th floor on January 8, giving the law firm time to remove more documents, people said.

Virtually all the lawyers in Zini's Park Avenue premises were Italians who could not practice before the New York bar, but who could process the paperwork for the numerous regulatory filings and bank transactions Parmalat requested.

Lawyers at the firm spent much of their time merely translating Italian documents into English, or vice versa, former employees said. That included much of the paperwork created to sell a billion dollars worth of Parmalat bonds to US and international investors. 

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