Away at the Opes of Monte dei Paschi di Siena on Mediobanca, which will end on September 8th. If the operation were to go through, the balance of power in Italian finance would change. For this reason the CEO of Mediobanca, Alberto Nagelis not there and questioned the spontaneity of the offer of MPS, assuming the government of the government behind the operation.
The Ops, which started yesterday, recorded so far 928 requests for adhesionequal to 0,0001% of the shares covered by the offer.
The numbers of the OPS
Few adhesions at the moment, but the Sienese bank has all the credentials to close the operation in late summer in the planned terms.
A MPS just collect the 35% of shares of Mediobanca to exercise a de facto check on Piazzetta Cuccia. But the goal is to reach 51% to thus strengthen your position within Mediobanca. All this is at hand, thanks to the participations in Mediobanca di Caltagirone (7.39%) e Dolphin (19.81%), who have already expressed their support for OPS. In addition to the Ok of the Ministry of the Treasury, which did not exercise the Golden Power, unlike what happened in the Unicredit-Banco BPM case.
Getting to 51% of adhesions would be a great result. Because, at that point, in Mediobanca it would be prevented from climbing Banca Generali in turn, thus canceling the Ops that the Milanese bank had launched in May.
Nagel attacks the government on the operation
Just the ok of the Ministry of the Treasury made the Naso to the CEO of Piazzetta Cuccia, Alberto Nagel, turn up his nose, according to which the government itself would be behind the OPS. In a conference call with shareholders, Nagel said:
The way in which the last tranche of Siena actions were sold, with the presence of two large shareholders who entered the capital of the Sienese bank simultaneously, makes us hypothesize that there were plans for Mediobanca even then, otherwise there would have been no reason to invest several hundreds of millions of euros in a bank when both are already exposed to Italian financial institutions.
Nagel refers to the tranche of 15% of MPS sold last November by the Ministry of Economy, which ended in the hands of key subjects of the operation such as Caltagirone, Delfin, Banco Bpm and Soul Holding. The sale of the quotas is now under the lens of the judiciary, after a complaint presented by Mediobanca.
If this operation were to go through, the shareholders Delfin and Caltagirone would thus consolidate an important position in three systemic financial institutions: Mediobanca, Mps and Banca Generali.
Nagel therefore believes little plausible that the initiative was born exclusively within the Sienese institute. The MPS CEO Luigi LovaglioAt the time of the launch of the operation at the end of January, he had instead revealed that the Sienese plan of the climb to Mediobanca had been conceived at the end of 2022.
The next steps
The board of directors of Mediobanca in recent days rejected the offer of MPS, considering it “hostile and not agreed, without industrial rational and convenience for the bank’s shareholders” and with a consideration offered “not adequate and completely inadequate”.
The operation thus risks going through, unless one direct intervention of the government to dilute tensions and relaunch a new consolidation path. Mediobanca, however, firmly reiterates its position: to defend a model based on an independent governance and a solid alliance with Generali.
