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Today's Wall Street Journal has a few interesting quotes:
The Parmalat affair, investigators say, was astonishing in its simplicity and amateurishness. Rather than the sophisticated financing vehicles and partnerships that Enron Corp. used, pieces of it were often little better than slapdash.
Though it did involve some hard-to-decipher financial transfers, it was apparently sustained through very basic techniques. Over the course of years, investigators say, documents were poorly forged on a scanner, then run through a fax machine to make them look authentic. Signatures... were lifted from old letters and copied onto new ones, and official stamps clearly tampered with. Then four times a year, when quarterly results were due, they say financial accounts and results were inflated.
An example: A single Parmalat unit claimed to have sold enough milk to Cuba to provide every single Cuban with about 55 gallons of milk a year.
Though it did involve some hard-to-decipher financial transfers, it was apparently sustained through very basic techniques. Over the course of years, investigators say, documents were poorly forged on a scanner, then run through a fax machine to make them look authentic. Signatures... were lifted from old letters and copied onto new ones, and official stamps clearly tampered with. Then four times a year, when quarterly results were due, they say financial accounts and results were inflated.
An example: A single Parmalat unit claimed to have sold enough milk to Cuba to provide every single Cuban with about 55 gallons of milk a year.
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