Unicredit has completed a transaction to purchase shares of Bpm bench foreseen by an option contract last November, before the Ops for the bank took place. It’s about 860 thousand shares, for a total of 5.6 million euros of expenditure.
The Italian banking giant was forced to make this operation public precisely because the takeover bid for Banco Bpm is underway, the public exchange offer with which Unicredit hopes to be able to convince the shareholders of the competing bank and acquire it, consolidating its position among the most important European groups in the financial sector.
Unicredit buys 860 thousand Bpm shares
The Italian banking giant Unicredit, among the most important in Europe, announced publicly that it had exercised an option agreed last November on 860 thousand shares of Banco Bpm. In recent weeks Unicredit has launched an OPS, a public exchange offer, right on Bpm, but this operation has nothing to do with this share purchase.
The option contract had in fact been signed in November, before the attempted acquisition of Unicredit materialised. It involved the purchase of 860 thousand shares of Banco Bpm at a price of 6.80 euros each, a price much lower than the market price for the Italian bank’s securities, 7.70 euros. The total expenditure for Unicredit is around 5.85 million euros.
Normally a company would not be obligated to publicly disclose deals of this type, especially of this size. Although 860 thousand shares may seem like a lot on the surface, it is only a small part of Banco Bpm’s total shares, 0.057%. However, Unicredit is involved in the public exchange offer on Bpm and is therefore forced to publish every operation of any size that concerns the company targeted by its acquisition attempt.
Messina also defends the Ops
Unicredit’s public exchange offer for Banco Bpm caused very strong reactions in the Italian Government, which interpreted it as an obstacle to the desired merger of the latter with Monte dei Paschi. The Minister of Economy Giancarlo Giorgetti went so far as to mention the possibility of using golden power, the law that allows the Government to block some acquisitions between companies.
However, the main manager of the largest Italian bank also arrived to defend the operation, the CEO of Intesa Sanpaolo Carlo Messina. In an interview with the Financial Times, the CEO declared that “Governments cannot choose based on their tastes and should only intervene in cases where financial stability is at stake.”
Messina’s reference is not only to Banco Bpm, but also to another Unicredit operation, the attempted merger with Commerzbank, one of the most important German banks. The government of Olaf Scholzwho had fallen in the meantime, had protested against the Italian bank’s attempts to get closer to the German bank from a financial point of view, fearing that one of the most important financial institutions in the country could fall into the hands of a foreign company.
