“Nagel and Pagliaro's team is very efficient. It's normal to let them work as they want”. With these words Vincent Bolloré, as he left Piazzetta Cuccia, gave news to reporters of the approval of the first of Mediobanca's governance reforms: the change in the composition of the nomination committee, which is responsible for designating, among other things, the directors for the boards of Generali, Rcs and Telco.
Until now, the choice of Piazzetta Cuccia's representatives was the responsibility of a team of three managers and three partners, to be exact Dieter Rampl, Marco Tronchetti Provera and Bolloré himself. From now on, however, the committee will have only five members: three managers and two independents. The novelty, elaborated with the collaboration and full consent of Dieter Rampl, president of Unicredit (top shareholder of Mediobanca with 8,6%), was welcomed at least apparently by Bolloré, already a protagonist of heated meetings last spring of the Generali board of directors, culminating in the defenestration of Cesare Geronzi. According to a current interpretation, the Trieste breakup could have been the prologue to a similar breakup in Mediobanca, or in any case a redefinition of the balance at the time of the renewal of the pact which could reduce the role of the French shareholders of group "C".
But Vincent Bolloré, as shown by this morning's statements, made immediately after the Pact executive meeting and before the start of the Pact assembly itself, is ready to defuse any polemic vein in the bud. Not only, as we have seen, does Bolloré show his full consent to the enlargement of the power of the managers but he "dribbles" the controversies regarding the system of cooptation of the new members of the pact. In summary, the regulation states that 75% of the votes in favor of the participants are needed to enter group A (banking and financial shareholders) and group B (industrial and private shareholders) while, so far, the simple consent of the Financière de Berges (ie a box of the Bolloré group) to enter group C. An anomaly that the new regulation intends to remove, by homologating the rules for the three groups. A reduction in Bolloré's power? No – replies the Breton financier himself – it was a transitional rule”. And he adds: “We only have positive components to present to the other shareholders. There is no problem". That is, in a less "Gallic" Italian, the people that Bolloré will propose, together with Groupama and the other Parisian shareholders, to replace the Banco de Santander of Emilio Botìn and his daughter Ana (who also left the Generali board of directors) should not arouse any hostility . In this regard, there has been talk of an interest by the heirs of the Dassault group even if the patriarch of the Parisian aeronautical giant, who left Mediobanca a few years ago, does not appear to be of the opinion.
In any case, Bolloré's message is clear: “It is normal – he said – for group C to have up to 11 percent and present the members it wants to have in the Pact to the other components. The other groups do it too. In other words, Bolloré is determined to prevent group C, i.e. the foreign shareholders, from being downsized in the next pact, which will undoubtedly leave the Botìn family, Sal Oppenheimer and, probably, other minor shareholders.
