Calisto Tanzi, former owner of Parmalat and former owner of Parma Calcio, died at the age of 83, whose parable ended with the crash of 2003 and the trials that followed.
Born in 1938 in Collecchio, the small town a stone's throw from Parma where he then built his empire, and graduated in accounting, in 1961, when he was only 22 years old, he started his milk business by taking over his grandfather's old company. family-run, and transformed it into a multinational company with over 130 plants around the world with a turnover of 20 billion lire in 1973, up to 550 in 1983.
Tanzi had in fact invented long-life milk but his ambition led him to expand from the food sector (not only milk but also preserves, snacks, yogurt) to tourism, TV, and even football. In the nineties the stock market, then the acquisitions, the recourse to the securities market and finally the crash in 2003. A crisis that started in 1999 when it acquired Eurolat from the Cirio group of Sergio Cragnotti for an exorbitant price, over 700 billion lire, to allow to Cragnotti to repay debts with Cesare Geronzi's Banca di Roma.
According to the investigators' definition, Parmalat thus became "the largest debt factory in the history of European capitalism".
Thousands of small savers ended up on the pavement: 80 thousand according to the then Governor of Bank of Italy Antonio Fazio, double according to the consumer associations. In December 2010, Tanzi was sentenced to 18 years in prison for a 14 billion euro crash.
(Unioneonline / D)
