Dive Brief:

• A federal appeals court has ruled that accounting firm Grant Thornton must face a lawsuit that alleges it contributed to the 2003 bankruptcy of Italian milk producer Parmalat SpA.
• The decision revives a moribund -- and nasty -- case in which the new management team at Parmalat blames Grant Thornton for failing to find and report massive fraud by the former management team.
• When Parmalat went bankrupt it had some $20 billion in debt -- roughly eight times more than what had been reported by the former management team.

Dive Insight:

The auditors, accountants and executives at Grant Thornton won't be pleased by the court's ruling. When another judge dismissed the case in April 2013, it must have seemed the whole ugly business was finally over.

But when there's this much money at stake, it was unlikely that Parmalat would disappear quietly. 

It would appear that the shelf life of this case is at least as long as that of Parmalat's famously long-lasting milk.