Decisive days for the future of Carige. To unblock the crisis, after the shareholders' meeting rejected the capital increase at the end of December, leading to the decay of the board of directors and the immediate appointment - by the ECB - of the former top management themselves as extraordinary commissioners (and during the entire duration of the commission, the stock will be suspended on the Stock Exchange, Consob has decided), the Government intervenes. It does so by putting its hands forward, in the sense that the theme of "bank bailouts" has been a battle horse of the electoral campaign: so much so that Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio he reiterated that the Italians will not pay out a single euro and said he was "not worried" by the story. Which, however, needs to be addressed in some way, and therefore - wanting to avoid a direct intervention to be burdened on taxpayers - the solution for now hypothesized is the same as the acquisition by Banca Intesa of Popolare di Vicenza and Veneto Banca. This time it could be MPS, in turn saved by the Treasury and now completely restored, to lead the operation.
Carige's situation is a little different from what affected Mps at the time: for the bank of Genoa, one cannot speak of a bailout in the strict sense, as receivership guarantees its full operation. But since the private shareholder Mattia Malacalza has ruled out a recapitalization (at least for the entire necessary amount of around 400 million euros), then the only way out identified would be the moral suasion of the Prime Minister, to convince a large institution to intervene. This time Intesa Sanpaolo has withdrawn and therefore the candidate name is that of Monte dei Paschi.
One of the mediation hypotheses – at the moment no more than this – would lead to a possible co-managed recapitalization: half the private individual, half the Sienese bank which would acquire the majority stake. Only partial and indirect state intervention, given that MPS is now controlled by the MEF, which holds 68% of the capital. In this way, it is the hope of those who are working on the project, Europe could have fewer pretexts for contesting the intervention, even if the move seems in any case difficult to accept by the EU Commission, in the light of the plan that the bank has agreed with Brussels to have the go-ahead for the precautionary recapitalization of the 5,4 billion state. Among the commitments undertaken there was in fact also the abstention from M&A.
In any case, according to what Il Messaggero writes, the operation would not only stop at the recapitalization in which Mps participates, but also at the sale of non-performing loans. And even in that case there would be the hypothesis of a public intervention. The extraordinary commissioners of Carige are in fact negotiating with Sga, the Treasury company that manages non-performing loans, to sell a large part of the bank's 3,7 billion euro of non-performing and substandard loans, in order to clean up the assets and make the sale of the institution attractive.
