The Lag case does not convince the Parma prosecutor's office that he would in fact have opened a file on this very issue. Parmalat is about to buy the American company Lag for 960 million dollars, but the matter risks causing a conflict of interest: in fact, the Colecchio company, which passed into the hands of the French Lactalis for 3,7 billion last year, buys Lag from the same transalpine group, thus transferring a large part of its liquidity - estimated at 1,4 billion euros - into its coffers. However, the news of the opening of the file has not yet been confirmed by either the company or the prosecutor. In the past few hours, two institutional investors of the Group have also spoken out against the acquisition of Lag by Parmalat: Fidelity Investments and Gamco Asset Management.
In the meantime, we're back to talking about a possible delisting of Parmalat and the title catches fire. At Piazza Affari the title earn 3,75% at 1,743 euro per share and volumes have already exceeded the daily average recorded in September. According to Intermonte analysts, "a hypothesis of delisting does not appear to be groundless, as it would allow the controlling shareholder to manage Parmalat in complete freedom without the constraints imposed by public listing and removing management from the attention of public opinion ”. At current prices, a delisting would cost a total of over 600 million euros.
A few days ago the Minister of Development, Corrado Passera, had expressed his disappointment in the way the French are managing the Collecchio company. “What happened with Parmalat was not a good result, from there they took everything away and left only what they couldn't take away,” said the Minister, “. The ideal would have been for Parmalat to have teamed up with another Italian company to create a great multinational champion”.
