Bank of America Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis on Wednesday estimated the bank had about $600 million of exposure to Parmalat. He said that bank employees involved in the Italian food company’s collapse are “no longer with us.”
Italian prosecutors are probing the bank’s role in the collapse of Parmalat, in what has become one of the world’s largest fraud scandals. “We have held everybody that we know was involved accountable, and they are no longer with us,” Lewis said at a shareholder meeting to approve Bank of America’s purchase of FleetBoston Financial Corp. He was responding to comments from Evelyn Davis, a well-known corporate gadfly. In January, Bank of America said it wrote off $114 million in the fourth quarter for Parmalat, and still had $274 million of exposure left. Lewis said the bank will seek insurance reimbursement for some of its exposure, and that about $120 million of the total exposure is not insured. Bank of America is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Fleet is based in Boston. The banks hope in early April to complete their merger, which was valued at $47 billion when it was announced in October