He moderates his tone and speaks of dialogue but in reality Assopopolari, the powerful association of cooperative banks, is sharpening its weapons against the reform decree of the Renzi government which provides for the transformation into a joint stock company in 18 months and the abolition of the per capita vote of the 10 major cooperative banks, seven of which are listed on the stock exchange and all with assets of over 8 billion euro.
This is the result of the board of directors of Assopopolari which yesterday discussed in Milan the counter-proposals to the government decree on the basis of the projects elaborated by a technical commission made up of Angelo Tantazzi, Piergaetano Marchetti and Alberto Quadrio Curzio.
In the first place, Assopopolari raises "doubts of the constitutional legitimacy of the forced conversion into joint stock company envisaged by the decree". The first parliamentary battleground on the Renzi reform will therefore be on the constitutionality of the decree. A point that Assopopolari's supporters have already raised in the Chamber where the Productive Activities and Finance commissions have scheduled the first hearings for next week (Assopopolari, Abi and Banca d'Italia) before going into the merits of the measure.
The first count will therefore take place on the constitutionality of the decree. Assopopolari's preliminary objective is clear: to reject the use of the decree and transform the provision into a bill in order to lengthen the reform times. The objections against the "necessity and urgency" of the decree are not new and echo those which in 92 the enemies of privatizations unsuccessfully raised against the decree of the first Amato government, which in one night transformed Iri, Eni, Enel and Ina from entities of management in spa. He has already answered these objections, in an interview with FIRSTonline the leader of the Democratic Center, Bruno Tabacci, recalling that the wait of more than twenty years for the reform fully justifies its need and urgency.
As for the merits of the question, Assopopolari's goal is to bring the per capita vote back through the window with the reform. While accepting "a more significant opening to capital in the formation of the governing bodies of the popular cooperative bank", Assopopolari hypothesizes, in the case of mandatory transformation into a joint-stock company, "a weighting of the capital vote, with particular favor for shareholders with ownership limited/durable shareholding”. Basically, according to Assopopolari, votes and actions must be weighed and not counted.
The move is astute because it apparently aims to favor small shareholders and long-term partners, but in reality it defends the positional rents of the "local squires" who dominate the large Popolari and whom Renzi harshly reproached. In this way, the anomaly of governance between Popolari and the other companies listed on the Stock Exchange would remain intact and economic democracy would continue to remain a dream.
Assopopolari always forgets that the Renzi reform does not concern all the cooperative banks at all but only the 10 largest including the 7 listed on the Stock Exchange which it is very difficult to consider still cooperative and more linked than others to the local area being, in most cases, large banking giants that have freely chosen to turn not to shareholders but to the capital market by listing on Piazza Affari.
