Bank of America has denied ever selling any Parmalat bonds on a retail level to small investors in Italy or the United States.
The bank representatives added that it, too, had been a victim of fraudulent accounting at Parmalat and lost some $450 million when the Italian dairy multinational collapsed in a 14-billion-euro financial meltdown at the end of 2003.
The representatives made their statements in testimony regarding relations between Parmalat and the bank before Europe's biggest corporate failure.
Bank of America has been singled out by Parmalat founder and former CEO Calisto Tanzi as being the 'puppet master' for a number of bond issues, stock flotations and private placements, including issuing shares in Parmalat's Brazilian subsidiary.
This operation, he claimed, "was the brainchild of Bank of America which handled everything, including giving false information to the market from December 1999 to 2003. Everything which had to to with that failed operation was planned and carried out by Bank of America".
Tanzi and the 15 other defendants are being tried here on a range of charges, including market rigging, false auditing, misleading investors and hindering the regulatory activities of bourse watchdog Consob.
The defendants include former Parmalat and Bank of America employees, two ex-Deloitte & Touche auditors and two auditing firms, the former Italian unit of Grant Thornton and the Italian office of Deloitte & Touche.
Parmalat was declared bankrupt in December 2003 after it emerged that four billion euros it supposedly held in an offshore Bank of America account did not in fact exist.
It later emerged that Parmalat's debt was more than eight times what the multinational had previously declared.
