The case of Cattolica Assicurazioni and the board blitz it has the CEO Alberto Minali was suddenly fired, despite having presented the best budget of the last ten years, is destined to be talked about for a long time and to turn the spotlight on the financial community. For at least two reasons: because the board's choice was not without consequences for savers as the stock immediately lost more than 4% on the stock market and because investors who hold approximately 20% of the capital, i.e. Warren Buffett and about twenty American funds, were unable to touch the ball and were unable to make their opinion heard on the decisions of the top management of the Veronese company.
FIRSTonline asked for an opinion on the case of Cattolica Assicurazioni a Filippo Cavazzuti, academic of the University of Bologna and former professor of Finance and financial intermediaries but above all undersecretary of the Treasury at the time of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and later a member of Consob under the presidency of Luigi Spaventa.
Here is his point of view: apart from the bank's official note which does not say much, "it is still not possible to know the full motivations of Cattolica Assicurazioni's board of directors which led to the unexpected distrust towards its CEO, but in the meantime the case certainly poses a problem for the legislator, to the Government and also to the supervisory bodies Consob and Ivass. But also on the Stock Exchange itself, as Cattolica is listed on Piazza Affari. The question, which disregards the specific reasons for the act of no-confidence, is the following: can a large insurance company be listed on the Stock Exchange, maintaining its cooperative guise?”
This is precisely what the financial community is also asking for: when a cooperative company, where – let us not forget this – one person vote is in force and each person votes regardless of the number of shares held (“one person, one vote”), it intervenes freely on the capital market and decides to be listed on the Stock Exchange – where the vast majority of other companies are organized in the form of joint stock companies where shares are counted and not weighed – can it maintain the form of cooperative society?
Isn't it paradoxical that Warren Buffett, who has invested a lot of capital in Cattolica Assicurazioni up to holding 9% of the company, counts exactly as much as a single saver who owns a single share? There cooperative form, with its values of solidarity, is fine in small companies where all the members know each other, but when a company grows and is listed on the Stock Exchange or issues bonds asking for capital on the market, does it make sense to maintain the same governance rules?
In these cases it would not be appropriate to exceed the per capita vote and enhance external investments? It is not a new problem and it had previously arisen for cooperative banks before the reform took place, but now the case of Cattolica Assicurazioni, which has meanwhile become one of the major Italian companies, is certainly destined to reopen it.
