With a summit at Palazzo Chigi between Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Deputy Prime Ministers Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio and with a subsequent package of amendments from the League to the tax decree the offensive of the yellow-green government to reform the CCBs has officially started, one of the Renzi Government trophies created in 2016 to secure the cooperative credit system as recommended by the Bank of Italy for some time.
Faced with the collapse of many small CCBs, the idea of the Renzi government had been to solicit the aggregation of cooperative credit banks around two national parent companies (one led by Iccrea and the other by Cassa Centrale Banca), to which was later added the Raiffeisen grouping of the Bccs of Alto Adige.
But precisely the obligatory aggregation in the national holdings, except for completely exiting the world of cooperative credit and transforming itself into a joint stock company as the Tuscan Bcc di Cambiano did, has never been much appreciated by the Northern banks close to the League which in the end convinced even the Five Stars a dismantle Renzi's reform in the name of banking sovereignty ill conceived. In fact, his parliamentary amendments cancel the obligation to join a national group of CCBs, making it purely optional a few days before the deadline by which the individual CCBs should sign the deed of joining or not joining one of the national groups.
On the basis of the parliamentary proposals of the League, the CCBs will be able to remain alone, with all the financial risks that stormy times like these and those that are announced after the end of Qe can involve. As an alternative to the obligation to join a national group of cooperative credit, the CCBs - if the Northern League amendments are approved by Parliament - envisage "the option to adopt systems of institutional protection" .
The obligation to join national cooperative credit groups will remain only for banks with shareholders' equity of less than 100 million euro, with a Common Equity Tier of less than 8 percentage points or with a different limit indicated by the Bank of Italy, with a Net Stable Funding Ratio less than 100 percentage points, with a Liquidity Coverage Ratio of less than 100 percentage points and with a Npl ratio greater than 15 percentage points”. But it is a fiction, because there is no CCB that falls below these thresholds.
