A lawyer for the former head of Parmalat quit on Friday after being included himself in an investigation into money laundering, the latest casualty in a global probe into a massive accounting scandal at the food firm.
"My colleague (Michele Ributti) has renounced his mandate and now we need to decide what to do," said Fabio Belloni, another lawyer representing former Parmalat chief Calisto Tanzi. "I am stunned."
Ributti was formally put under investigation on Thursday after tax police searched his office in Milan, judicial sources told Reuters.
Investigators in Parma, near the company's headquarters, and in Italy's financial capital of Milan, have been trying to unravel a multibillion-euro accounting fraud at the company which has said it has 14.5 billion euros ($18.6 billion) of debt.
At least 28 people are under investigation in Italy and 10 are under arrest, including Tanzi and two former finance directors of the global dairy-to-cakes group.
In Brazil, police are investigating suspected money laundering at the firm's operations in the country which make up about 10 percent of its global business. They are looking into the finances of 60 individuals and 27 companies.
"It's at the level of international crime," a person familiar with the Brazilian investigation said. "The numbers show the complexity of the Parmalat structure."
On Friday, Italy's fourth-biggest bank Capitalia denied its chairman Cesare Geronzi had been directly involved in the sale by food company Cirio of a milk firm to Parmalat, as claimed by a former Parmalat executive according to a magazine report.
Capitalia was a creditor of both Parmalat and Cirio, which is now also insolvent.
Friday's edition of news magazine L'Espresso quoted former Parmalat finance director Fausto Tonna as saying Geronzi had been present at a meeting where the 1999 sale of Eurolat for 330 million euros was discussed.
Tanzi on Friday faced a first round of questioning by magistrates in Parma, where he was taken on Tuesday after more than six weeks in Milan's San Vittore jail.
All 10 detainees are now in Parma, where a head magistrate, Giovanni Panebianco, retired earlier this month after he was involved in an inquiry into judicial corruption along with Luciano Silingardi, a former Parmalat executive.
Parmalat's head of operations in Portugal, Carlo Cattaneo, meanwhile denied Tanzi visited him in Lisbon days before his December arrest, newspaper Corriere della Sera said on Friday.
Tanzi had told magistrates he stayed with Cattaneo and visited the Catholic pilgrimage site of Fatima.
