Top Italian banker Cesare Geronzi was ordered to stand trial for extortion on Friday in a hearing tied to the 2003 fraudulent bankruptcy of dairy and food multinational Parmalat.
The proceedings involve Parmalat's 1999 purchase of milk company Eurolat from Cirio, another food giant which subsequently went bankrupt.
Geronzi, the 73-year-old chairman of Italy's influential merchant bank Mediobanca, is accused of forcing Parmalat to pay over the odds for Eurolat.
Charges of fraudulent bankruptcy against Geronzi, ex-Cirio chairman and former Lazio soccer boss Sergio Cragnotti and ex-Cirio executive Riccardo Bianchini Riccardi were shelved.
The court accepted a plea-bargain by former Parmalat chief Calisto Tanzi, who is at the centre of several trials regarding his group's collapse, his brother Giovanni and ex-Parmalat marketing director Domenico Barili.
The Tanzi brothers were each given two years and Barili eight months.
Calisto Tanzi has long claimed that he was manipulated by Parmalat's creditor banks.
While admitting his responsibility for Europe's biggest corporate collapse, Tanzi has also blamed Banca di Roma - which later became part of Capitalia - and Geronzi who was its chairman at the time.
With regard to Eurolat, prosecutors say Geronzi threatened to cut off Tanzi's credit line unless Parmalat bought the milk group.
They say the deal was ''strange to say the least'' given Parmalat's financial position at the time.
The operation raised eyebrows because proceeds from the sale, valued at some 168 million euros, were given directly to Banca di Roma, which not only had lent large sums of capital to Cirio but was also involved in placing both Parmalat and Cirio bonds with small investors.
The bonds became practically worthless when the two food multinationals collapsed.
Capitalia and Geronzi have denied wrongdoing, dismissing Tanzi's accusations as ''self-serving'' and saying that the transactions involved were ''amply documented and examined by independent third parties''.
Tanzi also claims he was pressured by Capitalia into buying Ciappazzi, a mineral water company, for ''a very high price with respect to its real value'', despite the bank's apparently knowing that Parmalat was in trouble.
Geronzi is among several defendants already on trial for the Ciappazzi affair, accused of fraudulent bankruptcy and extortion.
The silver-haired banker was also ordered to stand trial in Rome last September on charges of fraudulent bankruptcy and false accounting for his alleged role in Cirio's collapse.
It is not the first time Geronzi has been accused of fraudulent business practices.
In 2006, he was given a two-year suspended jail sentence for his role in the bankruptcy of property and tourism company Italcase-Bagaglino.
Geronzi, who moved to Mediobanca after Capitalia was incorporated last year into Unicredit, is currently appealing that sentence.
Cirio collapsed in July 2003 after defaulting on more than one billion euros in bonds. It became the first Italian company to double-default on a bond issue.
Parmalat collapsed at the end of that same year under 14.5 billion euros of debt accumulated through poor investments, waste, fraud and false accounting, which investigators believe may have dated as far back as 1987.
