After the banks also Will the insurers postpone the distribution of dividends? It is not said, because the business is different even if certainly the recommendations of the national and European authorities that push for a postponement of the coupon count.
The situation is moving and perhaps we will know more in the coming days when the Generali will reconvene the board of directors ahead of the shareholders' meeting on 30 April in Turin. For now, the resolution of the Generali board of directors of March 12 remains in force, which envisaged the distribution of an increasing dividend of 0,96 euros per share, but, after that meeting, the recommendations of Eiopa and Ivass arrived.
So: confirm the coupon or suspend its payment? The signals coming from the big European insurance companies are conflicting. The Germans of Allianz are oriented towards confirming the dividend and distributing it on May 6th, while, on the contrary, the French of Axa they postponed both the meeting and the decisions on the dividend to the end of June.
In Generali it is no mystery that the main shareholder (Mediobanca which has a stake of 13% of the capital) would like to receive the coupon without deferment which in his case is worth about a third of the profits and would amount to around 2019 million for the 200 financial year. But, of course, even the other most important shareholders of Leone such as Francesco Gaetano Caltagiorne and Leonardo Del Vecchio would be happy to immediately collect the dividend which is worth around 80 million euros for each of them.
It will be up to the CEO of Generali, Philippe Donnet, to make the synthesis and that's it it is probable that signals will already arrive from the next meeting of the board of directors of the Trieste company. Just in view of this appointment, Il Sole 24 Ore recalled that, on the occasion of the 2008-9 emergency, Generali, then led by CEO Giovanni Perissinotto, adopted an equilibrium solution in the 2009 meeting on the 2008 financial statements, confirming the distribution of the coupon but paying it partly in cash and in share part. If it were repeated today, it would be a sort of curious historical nemesis because the three main shareholders of Generali – Mediobanca, Caltagirone, Del Vecchio – who in 2012 imposed the sudden defenestration of Perissinotto two months after confirming it at today's meeting would be the main beneficiaries of the solution once devised by the former CEO of Leone.
The mixed solution – half cash dividend and half in shares – is a hypothesis on which even the current Leo summit is reflecting to evaluate whether or not it can be proposed again.
A mixed solution has somehow already decided the Unipol group which postponed the distribution of the dividend of the parent company but confirmed that of the subsidiary UnipolSai. Postponement of the coupon also for Cattolica Assicurazioni, which played in advance by deciding even before the recommendations of IVASS arrived.
In the coming days, with Generali's decisions, the picture of the entire insurance sector in relation to the due dates of the dividend in the Coronavirus emergency will become clearer.
