Official Swiss documents indicated Sunday that the sprawling international financial network set up by the Italian dairy giant Parmalat reached into Switzerland, where the failing group could have benefited from banking secrecy laws.
A low-ranking Parmalat employee, whose name was thought to have been used by former executives to head a series of front companies, is listed as an administrator of one of two firms linked to the group just across the border in Switzerland, according to trade register documents.
Angelo Ugolotti's name appears on the register in the southern Swiss city of Lugano for a subsidiary of Geslat S.r.l, which is listed as owned by Parmalat.
Italian investigators reportedly suspect the name of Ugolotti, a switchboard operator at the group's headquarters, was used without his knowledge to set up companies abroad that muddied the trail of the troubled group's estimated 10 billion-euro (12.9 billion-dollar) debt.
Prosecutors in Italy have sent a batch of requests for assistance to counterparts in Venezuela, Brazil, Luxembourg and the United States, but Switzerland has not been mentioned as part of their list so far.
Andrea Sadecky, a spokeswoman for Switzerland's federal prosecutor, told AFP Sunday she had no knowledge of an investigation at national level for now.
Local prosecutors in the Swiss canton of Ticino, which covers Lugano, could not be reached Sunday.
The Geslat subsidiary was originally set up in 1995 to handle credit dealings with third parties and to manage stakes in other companies, according a copy of the entry at the Lugano trade registry available on the Internet.
But it changed its business description four years later to the production and trading of food and dairy products, Parmalat's main line of business.