There are crucial games in Italian finance that manage to send even the institutions into a tailspin. This is the case of Generali and Consob. The struggle in Leo – very hard – to determine its leadership and strategy for the next few years is making the divisions within the authority that oversees companies and the stock market more acute and visible. If this were not the case, it would be difficult to explain the extremely irritated words written on Facebook by its president, Paolo Savona: “It is not I – he wrote – who keep Consob in check, but it is the old Consob that keeps Savona in check”. And again: “The eternal struggle between conservation and innovation is underway on which the future of Italy is being played”. The fuse of the outburst is an article, which appeared in the sheet, in which an account is taken of the divisions, the labor, the delays which, internally, have led the authorities to drag on for months the answer to the unanswered questions about the challenge of the Lion. The first will probably arrive today.
The main question was posed by the Capitoline entrepreneur Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone, second shareholder of Trieste with 8%, who, together with Leonardo Del Vecchio and the Crt Foundation, has entered into a consultation agreement (today over 16%) which aims, with its own team, to take over the reins of Generali whose board of directors – with the support of the first shareholder Mediobanca – instead aims to reconfirm, within its own list, the current one to Philippe Donnet. Well, Caltagirone wondered, but is a list legitimate that would actually, is the reasoning, the purpose of perpetuating Mediobanca’s domination? A crucial issue that came to a split Commission, which for a year and a half, according to well-informed sources, saw Savona himself in the minority. This, they say, until Chiara Mosca joined the Commission. The fact is that amidst very strong pressures on the technical point, different sensitivities, instead of responding only to the manufacturer on the case in question, at least at the beginning he preferred to fill in a “call for attention”. The draft, announced on 2 December, passed by a narrow majority of three to two and was subjected to a market consultation in recent weeks – unlawful for supervisory acts. Not a regulation, but only a set of recommendations: moral suasion, in short.
The wait has brought very high expectations. The Commission has begun to look into the case. And if he finds the changes requested yesterday from the technical offices that are appropriate, he should confirm, with small changes, the system already seen in the draft. In short: he will not ban the council list, simply because – it is pointed out – he does not have the power. In short, he will not rule on the legitimacy or otherwise of the board list. On the practice already envisaged in the statutes of 52 listed companies and implemented in 11 cases, a series of recommended measures will be detailed to obviate the risks of “self-referentiality and self-perpetuation” which are “more evident in companies with concentrated ownership”. But we talk in general. For an answer to Caltagirone on the specific case, some news could instead emerge next week.