By Gianluca Semeraro
MILAN (Reuters) – Alberto Nagel, the long-serving head of Mediobanca, resigned alongside the board on Thursday after losing a battle to fend off a takeover by Monte dei Paschi di Siena, one of the deals that are redrawing the map of Italy’s banking sector.
The state-backed Tuscan lender this month secured more than 62% in the Milanese merchant bank with a cash-and-share offer, and its stake is set to rise further with the reopening of the tender period, which ends on Monday.
Mediobanca said in a statement that all its directors, with except Sandro Panizza, tendered their resignations “in order to facilitate an orderly and timely transition through the appointment of a new management body”. The resignations will take effect on October 28 when a shareholders’ meeting will appoint the new board.
Nagel spent his whole career in Mediobanca and has been in charge as CEO for 17 years. During this time, the 60-year-old has steered the bank — which was founded to finance Italy’s post-war reconstruction — away from its role as a lynchpin of Italian capitalism, with its web of cross-shareholdings at the centre.
He expanded wealth management operations to complement the bank’s traditional corporate and investment banking (CIB) and consumer finance businesses, making targeted acquisitions in Italy and abroad.
In a farewell letter to his colleagues, seen by Reuters, Nagel used a Latin quotation to suggest that Mediobanca, even as prey, could end up having the upper hand over its predator, MPS, in terms of cultural influence, just as ancient Greece had over ancient Rome.
“Remember what (the ancient Roman poet) Horace wrote: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (Captive Greece conquered her savage victor)”, Nagel said.
INEVITABLE MERGER
The MPS takeover of its larger rival, launched as a surprise in January and worth more than 16 billion euros ($19 billion), brings together the commercial banking operations of the Tuscan lender with the investment banking and wealth management businesses of Milan-based Mediobanca.
In recent years, Nagel came under fire from Mediobanca’s two leading shareholders — Italian tycoon Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone and Delfin, the holding company of late Ray-Ban eyewear billionaire Leonardo Del Vecchio. Both bought significant stakes in MPS last year.
They accused him of failing to grow the business adequately and of relying too heavily on the contribution from Italy’s leading insurer Generali, in which Mediobanca is the top shareholder with a 13% stake.
MPS has built a stake of 62.9% in Mediobanca to date and could exceed 80% shareholder take-up, making a merger of the two groups inevitable, Mediobanca General Manager Francesco Saverio Vinci said last week in a video message to staff.
MPS has said it would preserve the Mediobanca brand and run its operations separately by appointing a successor to Nagel whom it is currently in the process of selecting.
The acquisition by MPS has the support of Italy’s government, which aims to create a stronger rival to market leaders Intesa Sanpaolo and UniCredit.
($1 = 0.8447 euros)
(Reporting by Gianluca Semeraro, editing by Keith Weir and Giselda Vagnoni)
