In a big article in the Fatto Quotidiano, Massimo Mucchetti he turns to Luca Lotti to "show him", accounts in hand, that the way out envisaged by the reform of the mutual banks would not be suitable even for Banca di Cambiano, in which a close relative of Lotti himself works.
I won't go into the merits of bank accounts what Mucchetti does, because I believe that this is not the task of a parliamentarian or any representative of the institutions. It is obvious that measures that favor a single subject must not be adopted, but arguments and proposals aimed at harming him must not be brought to Parliament either.
However, I would like to point out that the way out proposal, in the form of the spin-off of the Spa from the Cooperative, was put forward by various parliamentarians, including myself and David Zoggia, a Bersanian from the Veneto, which has nothing to do with the Tuscan banks, and was approved without problems in the Finance Commission in the Chamber. The least that can be said is that to "demonstrate" - so to speak - that the way out is not a convenient solution, Mucchetti should look not only to Cambiano, but to all the banks that are potentially interested in the measure. Otherwise the argument is worth very little.
But let's get to the issues of general interest. Would it have been appropriate to accept Federcasse's initial proposal, which did not envisage a way out and forced all the CCBs to aggregate around a single SpA? It is obvious that that hypothesis would have been a straitjacket, an excessive compression of the autonomy of individual banks and individual territories. And it is equally obvious that the serial opponents of the government would have attacked a alleged neo-centralism of the government, with a perverse plan aimed at compressing the riches of our territories, accumulated in more than a century of history and sacrifices. This would have seemed so unnatural that someone would probably have invented an interest of some member of the government in a CCB - or perhaps in Federcasse itself. Not well, but the government has therefore done very well in foreseeing a way out with respect to an excessively restrictive hypothesis.
Going to the bone, and always leaving aside the specific case of a single bank, the disadvantages that Mucchetti sees in the spin-off hypothesis are two. The first is that the Spa bank pays more taxes than the cooperative bank. The discovery of hot water: cooperatives pay less taxes than spas. As is known, this tax advantage is accepted in our legal system and also in the European one, because it is considered compensated by some constraints that cooperatives impose on themselves with respect to the distribution of profits and the indivisibility of reserves. For this reason, the strict European censors of competition believe that the tax advantage of cooperatives should not be considered state aid. It is therefore not at all obvious that the cooperative organization represents an advantage. It depends on the circumstances and this is the reason for the "biodiversity" that characterizes the markets in many sectors. Specifically, the central nucleus of the provision on the Bcc provides for the establishment of a parent holding company which will have the form of the Spa and therefore will also pay more taxes, as well as the Spas that will be established downstream of the cooperatives that will opt for the way out. In short, there will be higher taxes both in the basic hypothesis of the holding company and in the way out. If we don't say this, we mean things halfway and we don't give correct information.
The other disadvantage identified by Mucchetti consists in the fact that, at the time of the spin-off, a very high tax equal to 20% of the assets will have to be paid to the State. The observation is baffling: the government's initial proposal was to allow the release of reserves without any taxation. It was said, in particular by the minority of the Democratic Party and by Mucchetti himself, that this was an unjustified gift to these banks and harm to future generations. The subject was also raised by the large cooperative plants, with much more urban and convincing tones, and led the Finance Commission of the Chamber to modify the government's proposal by introducing the hypothesis of the way out through the spin-off of the banking business. In the opinion of the writer, and of many of the parliamentarians who reasoned on this point, it was not at all necessary to provide for a tax. However, a different line was passed, once again sponsored by a certain political party, according to which in the absence of the tax - or with a tax lower than 20% - there would have been an undue advantage to the cooperatives that would have chosen the way out. Therefore, the 20% tax was introduced to meet those who did not want the way out, and in any case identified the absence of a tax as an advantage for the CCBs that would have made this choice. Now Mucchetti is doing the math (and thinks he's doing it better than the insiders), and argues that with this tax a competitive disadvantage is even created such as to predict the bankruptcy of the banks that make the way out. If this argument had been raised earlier, during the process in the Chamber, and had been deemed reliable, we could have easily solved the problem: it would have been enough to set the tax at a lower level, e.g. at 10%.
However, it is evident that there are two cases. Either Mucchetti's accounts are wrong and then the matter ends there. Or his accounts are correct, and in this case Parliament – certainly not Luca Lotti – would have worked to create one disadvantage for the banks like that of Cambiano, who do not want to join the heavy wagon of Federcasse. In any case, it is not clear how it can be said that the Chamber or the Government have worked for interests other than that of the entire community.
