These are not happy times for Mediobanca's salon. "The relevant matches - writes Il Foglio - no longer pass through the confessional of Italian capitalism that belonged to Enrico Cuccia and which today resembles a pied a terre rented to Vincent Bollorè, the French heir of relational capitalism, a master of Chinese boxes".
In fact, in a few days Mediobanca, which has little chemistry with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, ended up offside three times but already in the previous weeks it had already had to make the best of its bad luck when Vincent Bollorè, who is also one of the main shareholders of Mediobanca as well as Generali, Telecom Italia and of course Vivendi, had paved the way for the ascent of Philippe Donnet (who is also on the board of Vivendi) at the helm of the Lion of Trieste to replace the outgoing Mario Greco.
The most sensational setback, even if the game is not over, Mediobanca suffered it in RCS on which the publisher of La7, Urbano Cairo, launched a public offer with the support of Intesa Sanpaolo but without even informing the CEO Piazzetta Cuccia, Alberto Nagel who started the counterattack by inducing the RCS board of directors to define the offer as hostile and too low. Nagel would like to send the owner of Il Messaggero, Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone, onto the track for the conquest of Corriere della Sera, as an alternative to Cairo, who has never made a secret of investing in newspapers as a function of his main business, which remains that of construction. If Caltagirone, which is helping Nagel to strengthen its presence in Generali, took the field for Corriere della Sera, an icon of the Milanese bourgeoisie, there would probably be a revolt by civil society but also by the establishment. And it is no coincidence that even Fedele Confalonieri, Silvio Berlusconi's right-hand man in Mediaset, thundered against the merger between the L'Espresso group and La Stampa but blessed the Cairo operation on RCS.
Mediobanca suffered the second setback on Telecom, of which it remained an important shareholder, after the launch of the Government plan for the development of ultra-broadband in Italy as well, leveraging on Enel, whose entry into the field displaced the incumbent of the telecommunications companies and its major shareholders, from Bollorè to Piazzetta Cuccia. In the future, the telephone pax could pass from the spin-off of the Telecom fixed network, as a report by Mediobanca Securities hopes, and from the establishment of a new network company open to the market with Telecom, Enel and Cdp, but it is not a path for today.
Then there is the Atlante chapter, the fund with private capital but blessed by the Government, which has already raised almost 4 billion euros and which aims to facilitate the reduction of bank non-performing loans (Mps in the lead), which weigh like a ballast on the system , and to ensure the success of the next capital increases, starting with Popolare Vicenza and Veneto Banca, a flop of which would risk having serious systemic effects. The main banks, foundations, CDP and insurance companies are in the Atlante Fund, but Mediobanca is not there, not even as a consultant. In other times it would have been unthinkable, but the era of good living rooms is over and, although relational capitalism is not over yet, its center of gravity is no longer in Piazzetta Cuccia.
