At Palazzo Mezzanotte, headquarters of the Italian Stock Exchange, the hour of retreat arrives. As it shot Brexit time (remember that Borsa Italiana is controlled by the London Stock Exchange) many managers have already left the company that controls the Milan stock exchange: among these, it is worth mentioning Luca Peyrano, CEO of Elite (the platform created in 2012 which coordinates 1.400 unlisted SMEs in 45 different countries around the world), and that of the chief financial officer Andrea Maldi, who had been working at Piazza Affari for five years. To these are added about twenty professionals who have left EuroTlx, the multilateral trading system 4 operates in the trading sector. Some of them, again according to what the financial weekly Milano Finanza claims, would have found a place at Mediobanca. Without forgetting that from next April XNUMX Raffaele Jerusalmi, while remaining managing director of Borsa Italiana, will leave the global responsibility of the Capital Markets of the London Stock Exchange, i.e. the heart of the Stock Exchange.
More than Brexit itself, it was what triggered the flight of managers the green light given last November from the shareholders of the London Stock Exchange to the 27 billion dollar acquisition of Refinitiv, the competitor database of Bloomberg, in the hands of 55% by the Americans of Blackstone and 45% by the Canadians of Thomson Reuters. This means that after the operation Blackstone and Thomson Reuters will have a total of 37% of the LSE capital and 30% of the voting rights. A corporate reorganization was therefore obvious, which however began in January, since London announced that the global head of Capital Markets will no longer be the CEO of Borsa Spa, Raffaele Jerusalmi, but Murray Roos, a new manager arriving from Citi. Roos will assume the role of group director of the Capital Markets sector and will be a member of the executive committee of LSE. He will report directly to Chief Executive Officer David Schwimmer.
The departure of some professionals is not the only case that alarms Borsa Italiana: on Friday 31 January, the warning from the OECD also arrived, saying that Piazza Affari is too small and Italy needs to see the number of listed companies increase. According to the Capital Market Review report on Italy, in recent years the country has undertaken important structural reforms to improve the financial strength of companies and to strengthen the capital markets as a complementary source of financing for them. However, the Italian capital market is still undersized compared to many other advanced economies.
