Professional Documents
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CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK CORGCorporate Governance: An International Review0964-8410Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 July 2005134478488EDITORIALCORPORATE
GOVERNANCE FAILURESCORPORATE GOVERNANCE
Introduction
he Parmalat situation started out as a fairly standard although sizeable accounting fraud. The Parmalat group, a world leader in the dairy food business, collapsed and entered bankruptcy protection in December 2003 after acknowledging massive holes in its nancial statements. Billions of euros seem to have gone missing from the companys accounts. This dramatic collapse has led to the questioning of the soundness of accounting and nancial reporting standards as well as of the Italian corporate governance system. Some of the Anglophone business media (e.g. Heller, 2003; Mulligan and Munchau,
*This paper was presented at the 2nd International Conference on Corporate Governance Corporate Governance: Effective Boards and Responsible Investors, 29 June 2004 at the Centre of Corporate Governance Research, Birmingham Business School. **Address for correspondence: Dipartimento di Ricerche aziendali, Facolt di Economia, University of Cagliari, Viale S. Ignazio 17, 09126 Cagliari, Italy. Tel: +39-0706753352; Fax: +39-0706753321; E-mail: melisa@unica.it
2003; Lyman, 2004) have been labelling the Parmalat case as a particularly Italian scandal, suggesting that a case such as Parmalat is country-specic and more likely to happen in Italy than elsewhere. This is not surprising as Italy is also widely represented as a bad example in the existing international academic literature on corporate governance (e.g. La Porta et al., 1997; Macey, 1998; Johnson et al., 2000). It has been argued that its reputation for corporate governance is sufciently bad to let international authors on this topic feel condent in awarding bad marks without serious eld research. Institutions of Italian corporate governance have been translated in black and white, and some have not been translated at all (Stanghellini, 1999, p. 4).
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The main purpose of this paper is to examine the Parmalat case in order to understand to what extent it may be considered a particularly Italian scandal, which might imply that international scholars and policy makers could disregard the corporate governance problems that emerged at Parmalat as countryspecic, or whether it is a case that ts into a global corporate governance argument. The main accounting and corporate governance issues related to the case will be examined and discussed. The paper will focus on the supply side of information (i.e. internal governance agents, senior management and external auditors). The role of the information demand-side agents (i.e. institutional and private investors, information analysers such as nancial analysts and rating agencies, etc.) is out of the scope of the paper since those agents are not country-related factors. Legal aspects of the case will be not be discussed since prosecutors are still investigating these issues. It has been argued (see Melis and Melis, 2004) that the Parmalat case is not due to a failure of generally accepted accounting principles. Although nancial misreporting is the most evident issue, the Parmalat case is basically a false accounting story due to corporate governance failures. Nevertheless, the question that it raises is how it was possible. Why did the corporate governance system not make senior managers accountable for their action and, if not prevent, stop their action well before the companys collapse? Therefore, the main characteristics of Parmalats corporate governance structure will be
examined in order to understand why false accounting was possible and remained concealed for over a decade. In the next sections the paper will investigate which monitoring mechanisms failed, and to what extent these failures are due to weaknesses specic to the Italian corporate governance system, or if in fact they t into the global corporate governance issues. Hence the paper will compare and contrast the main characteristics of Parmalats corporate governance system with the corporate governance system that prevails among Italian listed companies as well as with the recommendations of the Italian code of best practice, in terms of ownership, control and monitoring structures.
Table 1: Ownership and control structure of listed companies 1996 Type of control (1) Majority control Working control Under shareholders agreement No controlling shareholder(s) Total Concentration (2) Largest shareholder Other major shareholders Market Total 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
Source: Elaborated from C.O.N.S.O.B. (2003, 2004). Data updated at December 2003. (1) Percentage ratio of the market share value of the ordinary share capital of the companies subject to each type of control to the market value of the ordinary share capital of all the companies listed at the Italian Stock Exchange. (2) As a percentage of the market value of the ordinary share capital of all the companies listed at the Italian Stock Exchange.
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1999), but it is also a common problem among continental European groups (Becht, 1997). In these groups a holding company controls (directly or indirectly) the majority of voting rights of the companies which belong to the group. Its ultimate control is held by a single entrepreneur, or a family (as in the Parmalat case), or a coalition. In fact, Parmalat S.p.A. represented the core milk and dairy food business of the Parmalat group, and controlled 67 other companies directly (as at 31 December 2002), and many others indirectly (Parmalat S.p.A., 2002). It was an unlisted company controlled by Parmalat Finanziaria with 89.18 per cent of its voting share capital. The remaining 10.82 per cent of the shares were owned by Dalmata S.r.l., an unlisted nancial company which was fully controlled by Parmalat Finanziaria. Parmalat Finanziaria was listed on the Milan stock exchange market. Its main shareholder (as at 30 June 2003) was represented by Coloniale S.p.A., which owned 50.02 per cent of the company voting share capital: 49.16 per cent was held directly, while 0.86 per cent was controlled indirectly through the Luxembourg-based Newport S.A.. Two institutional investors (Lansdowne Partners Limited Partnership and Hermes Focus Asset Management Europe Limited), which owned 2.06 per cent and 2.2 per cent respectively, were the major minority shareholders. Coloniale S.p.A., the holding company of the group, was under the control of the Tanzi family, through some Luxembourg-based companies. Therefore, the Tanzi family was the ultimate shareholder controlling Parmalat Finanziaria and the whole Parmalat group. A simplied structure of the group will be shown, displaying only the links that are more relevant to the purpose of the paper (see Figure 1). Shleifer and Vishny (1986) argued that large shareholders have adequate incentives to exercise monitoring. Empirical evidence (e.g. Becht, 1997; Molteni, 1997; Melis, 1999) shows that the Italian prevailing control structure is characterised by the presence of an active shareholder (the blockholder) who is willing and able to monitor the senior management effectively. This type of ownership and control structure allegedly reduces the classical agency problem between senior management and shareholders: senior managers who pursue their own self-interest at the expense of shareholders will be displaced by the controlling shareholder. Nevertheless, the agency problem is only shifted towards the relationship between different types of shareholders: the controlling shareholder and minority share-
holders (La Porta et al., 2000; Melis, 1999, 2000). If the main corporate governance issue in the USA is strong managers, weak owners (Roe, 1994), the key corporate governance problem in Italy is about weak managers, strong blockholders and unprotected minority shareholders (Melis, 2000, p. 351). Blockholders may use their power to pursue their interests at the expense of minority shareholders, by diverting corporate resources from the corporation to themselves, either legally or illegally (Johnson et al., 2000). This is what happened in the Parmalat case: Tanzi acknowledged to Italian authorities that Parmalat funnelled about Euro 500 million2 to companies owned by the Tanzi family, especially to Parmatour. The latter was not a subsidiary of Parmalat. It was an unlisted company owned by Nuova Holding, a Tanzi family investment company.
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49.16%
Parmalat Finanziaria
100% 89.18% 0.33% 10.82%
Dalmata Srl
Parmalat S.p.A.
5% 100% 100%
95% 64.22%
100%
ber of auditors (not less than three), the number of alternates (not less than two), the criteria and procedures for appointing the chairman of the board of statutory auditors and the limits on the accumulation of positions. Corporate by-laws shall also ensure that one (or two, when the board is composed of more than three auditors) of the members of the board of statutory auditors is appointed by the minority shareholders, so that the composition of the board reects the will of all shareholders. Parmalat Finanziarias board of statutory auditors was composed of three members, i.e. the legal minimum requirement. This is not
unusual among Italian listed companies. Consob (2002) reported that approx. 92 per cent of the boards of statutory auditors of listed companies were composed of three members. Even among the largest companies that are listed in the MIB304 (as Parmalat Finanziaria was from 1994 to 1999 and again from 2003), only approximately 30 per cent of the companies have set up a board of statutory auditors with more than three members. In such a case companies always choose a ve-member board (see Figure 2). As underlined in Melis (2004), the size of the board of statutory auditors has a direct inu-
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ence over the level of protection on minority shareholders because some powers (e.g. the power to convene a shareholders meeting because of a directors decision) may be exercised only by at least two members of the board jointly. Only when the board of statutory auditors is composed of more than three members can minority shareholders appoint two statutory auditors. The Parmalat Finanziaria board of statutory auditors never reported anything wrong in their reports, nor to courts or to CONSOB5 (Cardia, 2004). Nor did the statutory auditors at Parmalat S.p.A. or any of its subsidiaries. Even when, in December 2002, a minority shareholder (Hermes Focus Asset Management Europe Ltd) led a claim (pursuant to clause 2408 of the Italian civil code) regarding, among other issues, related-parties transactions, the board of statutory auditors answered that no irregularity was found either de facto or de jure. This seems to conrm the argument (see Melis, 2004) that in a corporate governance system characterised by the presence of a
strong blockholder, like Parmalat (and most Italian companies), the board of statutory auditors seems to provide a legitimating device, rather than a substantive monitoring mechanism. The inefciency of the board of statutory auditors as a monitor has been attributed to (a) its lack of access to information related to shareholders activities, and (b) its lack of independence from the controlling shareholders (for a further analysis of these issues see Melis, 2004).
69%
31%
Board of statutory auditors composed of five members Board of statutory auditors composed of three members
Source: Elaborated with data based on CONSOB database. Data updated at December 2003. One company listed on MIB30 has not set up a board of statutory auditors. Being based in the Netherlands it has chosen a twotier board structure, with a supervisory council. Figure 2: Size of the board of statutory directors among Italian MIB30 listed companies
Table 2: Total assets and consolidated revenues audited by the chief auditor and other auditors 1999 Total assets of the group non audited by the chief auditor Total assets of the group audited by the chief auditor Consolidated revenues non audited by the chief auditor Consolidated revenues audited by the chief auditor 22% 78% 16% 84% 2000 40% 60% 23% 77% 2001 42% 58% 23% 77% 2002 49% 51% 30% 70%
Source: Elaborated with data based on auditors reports (see Parmalat Finanziaria S.p.A. 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002).
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Deloitte & Touche always rendered a nonstandard report underlying that up to 49 per cent of total assets of the group and 30 per cent of the consolidated revenues came from subsidiaries which were audited by other auditors (see Table 2). In relation to the above-mentioned amounts, Deloitte & Touche stated that their opinion was basely solely upon other auditors reports. In fact, mandatory audit rotation was not completely effective: Grant Thornton S.p.A. continued as auditor of Parmalat S.p.A. as well as certain Parmalat off-shore subsidiaries even after 1999. This means that Deloitte & Touche had been relying on Grant Thorntons work to give their opinion about Parmalat Finanziaria consolidated nancial statements. Among other subsidiaries, Grant Thornton, specically two of their partners who had been auditing companies related to the Tanzi groups since 1980s,6 audited the Cayman Islands based Bonlat Financing Corporation. The latter was the wholly owned subsidiary, set up in 1998, that held the now well-known ctitious Bank of America account. This nonexistent bank account raises fundamental questions about the role of the external auditor. Grant Thornton claimed to have sent a request to Bank of America in December 2002 asking for conrmation of the bank account. The latter denied that they had received the request. Grant Thornton received a reply in March 2003, which was printed on Bank of America letterhead and signed by a bank employee. It is now believed that this conrmation letter was forged by Parmalat management. Grant Thornton publicly claimed that its staff acted correctly, and that the forged document made them a victim of fraud. Nevertheless, even if the letter was a forgery, auditors may not label themselves as victims. Cash deposits are not complicated to evaluate, since they may be easily matched to a bank statement as part of a companys reconciliation procedures. The purpose of the third party conrmation is to ensure that bank statements received directly by the client and used in the reconciliation process have not been altered. When conrmation replies are not received on a timely basis, auditors should either send second requests or ask the client to provide a bank contact, so that they may reach the contact directly. It is not clear whether Grant Thornton sent a second conrmation request given the time lag between the conrmation request and the response. However, they acknowledged that the request to Bank of America was done via the Parmalat chief nance director rather than
getting in contact with Bank of America directly. Therefore, it seems reasonable to argue that they could have discovered the fraud if they had acted according to general auditing standards and exhibited the proper degree of professional scepticism in executing their audit procedures. Prosecutors believe that the Grant Thornton auditors were too involved in the Bonlat issues, since the setting up of the latter was allegedly their idea to keep concealed the Parmalat nancial crisis from the eyes of the incoming chief auditor Deloitte & Touche. With regard to the Enron case, Palepu and Healy (2003) argue that the auditing rm rstly failed to exercise sound business judgement in reviewing transactions that were in fact creative accounting, i.e. only designed for nancial reporting rather than business purposes. Then they succumbed to pressures from Enrons management. Mutatis mutandis, the Parmalat case does recall the Enron case with regard to the failure of the role of the external auditor at Parmalat as a gatekeeper, who was either not competent or (more likely in the case of Grant Thornton) not independent. This side of the story seems to t perfectly into the global corporate governance issues. Thus it is against the argument of Parmalat as a particularly Italian case.
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the companys strategic, operational and nancial plans and the corporate structure of the group, and (b) the examination and approval of transactions having a signicant impact on the companys protability, assets and liabilities or nancial position, with special reference to transactions involving related parties. Cavallari et al. (2003) report that, on a sample of Italian listed companies which represented 85 per cent of total capitalisation of the markets, 85 per cent of the companies fully complied with these recommendations. Eleven per cent of the sample complied partially, and only 4 per cent did not declare explicitly to reserve any of these functions to the board of directors. According to its company reports on corporate governance, Parmalat Finanziaria, the listed holding company of the group, had complied with these recommendations since 2001.
directors, including three Tanzi family members. One of the allegedly non-executive directors (Barili) belonged to the executive committee, and had been working in Parmalat as senior manager from 1963 until 2000. With regard to the composition of the board, it is also interesting to observe that eight Parmalat Finanziaria directors also sat on the board of directors of Parmalat S.p.A., including all the members of the executive committee and one non-executive director.
Table 3: Composition of board of directors by type of control of listed companies Type of control (1) Majority control Working control Under shareholders agreement No controlling shareholder(s) Total Executive 3.1 3.4 4.5 4.7 3.5 Non-executive 6.3 7.5 7.1 8.1 6.8 Total 9.4 10.9 11.6 12.8 10.3
Source: Elaborated from CONSOB (2003). Data updated at December 2002. (1) Percentage ratio of the market share value of the ordinary share capital of the companies subject to each type of control to the market value of the ordinary share capital of all the companies listed on the Italian Stock Exchange.
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52.2%
10%
90%
47.8%
No Yes, with no executive powers delegated to the Chairperson Yes, with some executive powers delegated to the Chairperson
Source: Elaborated with data based on CONSOB database. Data updated at December 2003. Figure 3: Separation between Chairperson and CEO among MIB 30 listed companies
national corporate governance codes of best practice since the Cadbury report (1992), Parmalat Finanziaria did comply with the Italian code of conduct since adequate information on the powers delegated to the Chairman/CEO was disclosed in its annual report. The Preda Code (1999, 2002, para. 5) recommends that the Chairperson of the executive committee periodically report to the board of directors on the activities performed in the exercise of his/her powers. At Parmalat Finanziaria this report was done quarterly. Thus it complied with this recommendation.
Condential information
The Preda Code (1999, 2002, para. 6) deals with the handling of condential information and recommends companies adopt internal procedures for the internal handling and disclosure of price-sensitive information, as well as information concerning transactions that involve nancial instruments, carried out by persons who have access to relevant information. Cavallari et al. (2003) report that the great majority (90 per cent in 2003, 81 per cent in 2002 and 58 per cent in 2001) of the Italian listed companies analysed complied with this provision. Parmalat Finanziaria had informal internal procedures until 2002, when it set up a more structured system, under the responsibility of the Chairman/CEO Tanzi. Thus it formally complied with the Preda Code on this issue. In fact, empirical evidence shows clearly that the above-mentioned procedures that dealt with condential information were only used to keep concealed the accounting fraud for more than a decade.
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Internal control and the role and composition of the internal control committee
The internal control committee is recommended by the Preda Code (1999, 2002, para. 10.2) to (a) assess the adequacy of the internal control system, (b) monitor the work of the corporate internal auditing staff, (c) report to the board of directors on its activity at least every six months and (d) deal with the external auditing rm. It has a similar role to that
of British audit committees (see Spira, 1998; Windram and Song, 2004). It is appointed by the board of directors and should be composed of non-executive directors in order to be able to carry out its functions autonomously and independently. The Preda Code (2002, para. 10.1) recommends that the majority of its members should be independent directors. Cavallari et al. (2003) report that almost 90 per cent of the sample analysed adopted an internal control committee, which in over 82 per cent of the cases is entirely composed of non-executive directors, who are almost always independent. At Parmalat Finanziaria, the internal control committee was composed of three members. Two of these members also sat in the executive committee. Thus, non-executive directors did not represent the majority of the committee. The recommendation of the Preda Code was not complied with, but no adequate explanation was given by the company in its corporate governance report. It is also worth noting that one of the internal control committee members (Tonna) had been the chief nance director from 1987 until March 2003. He also held the Chairman position at Coloniale S.p.A., the Tanzi family holding company which was also the major shareholder of Parmalat Finanziaria. The third member of the internal control committee, who was also the Chairman of the committee, was allegedly an independent director. However, further analysis (based on data not provided by the company) shows that he was the chartered certied accountant of the Tanzi family (as well as an old personal friend of Tanzi). Claiming that this relationship is not signicant enough to inuence his autonomous judgement seems difcult to argue and/or believe. Therefore, it may be argued that none of the members of the internal control committee could have actually been considered as independent. The Preda Code (1999, 2002, para. 3.2) acknowledges that when a group of shareholders controls a company, the need for some directors to be independent from the controlling shareholders is even more crucial. Parmalat Finanziaria failed to comply with this important recommendation, and did not give any adequate explanation for not complying.
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nies are recommended to set up a procedure to deal with these transactions. In its corporate governance report, Parmalat Finanziaria claimed to comply with this provision, although empirical evidence clearly shows that such transactions were not treated according to the above-mentioned criteria.
key existing Italian corporate governance standards of best practice, such as the presence of independent directors, the composition of the board of directors and, especially, of the internal control committee (i.e. the audit committee). Besides, the roles of the external auditor as well as the internal control committee as noneffective monitors seem to suggest that the Parmalat case ts, to some extent, into the global corporate governance argument and is not very different from Enron or other AngloAmerican or continental European corporate scandals. Whilst the Parmalat case may be considered to some extent a particularly Italian case, this does not imply that the corporate governance problems that emerged at Parmalat should be disregarded and catalogued as countryspecic, since they may also surface at other rms around the world.
Concluding remarks
The paper examined and discussed to what extent Parmalat may be considered a particularly Italian case, or rather a case that ts into the global corporate governance argument. The paper has looked at the role of the information supply agents (board of directors, board of statutory auditors, internal control committee, senior management and external auditing rm) in the Parmalat case. Empirical evidence seems to conrm the lack of a monitoring structure making corporate insiders accountable in the presence of a corporate governance system characterised by a controlling shareholder. The roles of the ownership and control structure (with special regard to the controlling shareholders role), and of the board of statutory auditors, do have Italian traits and might suggest that Parmalat is a particularly Italian corporate governance case. Moreover, the controlling shareholder was able to hold the positions of Chairman and CEO of Parmalat Finanziaria, which led to a huge concentration of powers. Although this concentration of positions is unusual among large Italian listed companies, the separation between the two positions is not explicitly recommended by the Italian code of best practice, so that Parmalat formally complied with it. Although Italian corporate governance standards are not the highest at an international level, and might need improving, the standards themselves were not at fault in the Parmalat case, at least not completely. In fact, Parmalats corporate governance structure failed to comply with some of the
Notes
1. Pyramidal groups, which are very widespread in Italy, have been dened as organisations where legally independent rms are controlled by the same entrepreneur (the head of the group) through a chain of ownership relations (Bianco and Casavola, 1999, p. 1059). 2. Prosecutors believe that Tanzi funnelled over 1.500 million to Parmatour and some other million to other Tanzi family-owned companies. 3. Since 2004 the new company law allows companies to choose between a unitary board structure (with an audit committee within the board of directors), a two-tier board structure (with a management committee and a supervisory council), and the traditional board structure with the board of statutory auditors. 4. MIB30 is the Italian equity share market segment that includes companies with a capitalisation above 800 million. 5. CONSOB (Commissione Nazionale per le Societ e la Borsa) is the public authority that is responsible for regulating and controlling the Italian securities markets. 6. Mr Pecca, the President of Grant Thornton in Italy, and Mr Bianchi audited Parmalat from the 1980s, rst as auditors of Hodgson Landau Brands, then as Grant Thornton. 7. In total 53 per cent of MIB30-listed companies delegate some powers to their Chairperson: 10 per cent of these companies do not separate the Chairperson and CEO positions and 43 per cent do separate the two positions. 8. See IAS 24 (IASB, 2003) for a denition of transaction for related parties.
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Andrea Melis is associate professor in Accounting and Business Administration at the Departiment of Ricerche aziendali, University of Cagliari, Italy. He has a Masters degree in Strategic management from the Nottingham Business School (UK) and obtained his PhD in Accounting and business administration from the University of Rome, Italy. He is author of two books on corporate governance as well as several articles on issues related to nancial reporting and corporate governance. His main research interests encompass accounting, nancial reporting and corporate governance issues in a wide range of organisations.
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