Giancarlo Parretti (born 23 October 1941) is an Italian financier.[2][3]
Early life and business interests
Parretti was born in Orvieto, north of Rome, Italy. He worked as a waiter in London before moving to Sicily. There, he said, he used government aid to buy and sell at least four hotels. In 1983, he bought three Italian insurance companies and two years later sold them to a Geneva-based merchant bank, Sasea Holdings.[4]
Parretti once was an owner and chairman of the 300-hotel Melia Hotel chain, and Renta Immobiliaria S.A, a Spanish real estate company. He was once a partner of the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
In 1986, Parretti gained control of Le Matin de Paris, a Socialist newspaper in Paris, which went bankrupt a year later.[8]
In 1989, he took over Cannon Film Group Inc. from Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Almost immediately, he made plans to take over the historic French studio Pathé, and changed Cannon's name to Pathé Communications. However, the French government blocked his bid due to concerns about his background.[9]
"In 1990, the Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti was trying to line up the Liberian government as an investor in a company he was using to buy MGM/UA Communications. But the relationship ended when Mr. Parretti’s ally, the Liberian president Samuel K. Doe, was tortured and killed by opponents."[10]
Undaunted, Parretti bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1990 for $1.2 billion,[11] using money borrowed from a Dutch subsidiary of Crédit Lyonnais and contingent on future profits financing the purchase from mogul Kirk Kerkorian.
Parretti persuaded Time Warner to guarantee a US$650 million loan to help his Pathé Communications to carry out the deal, with Time Warner in return gaining access to 3,000 films in the Pathe and MGM/UA libraries to distribute worldwide through theaters, TV and video.[12]
Parretti then merged the former Cannon with the MGM purchase to create the short-lived MGM-Pathé Communications.
Under Parretti's control, MGM released almost no films (one victim being the James Bond franchise, the planned production of the seventeenth Bond film, Property of a Lady[13][14][15]), while Parretti enjoyed a Hollywood mogul lifestyle. He fired most of the accounting staff and appointed his 21-year-old daughter to a senior financial post. He used company money for presents to several girlfriends, including a former runner-up for Miss Universe. In 1991, his ownership dissolved in a flurry of lawsuits and a default to Crédit Lyonnais, and Parretti faced securities fraud charges in the United States and Europe.[16][17][18][19] In March 1999, he was found guilty of misuse of corporate funds and fraud and he was sentenced in absentia to four years in prison and fined 1 million Ff by a Paris court.[20]
"an ex-waiter whose principal expertise was Ponzi schemes, not film"...much of the bank's money went to what were euphemistically called 'development deals' involving young women who were neither filmmakers nor developers"[21] – Peter Bart
Parretti is the subject of the 2024 documentary The Man Who Definitely Didn’t Steal Hollywood, directed by John Dower.[22][23]
