The shareholders' meeting of Monte dei Paschi has appointed Massimo Tononi new president of Banca Mps. Tononi, formerly part of the bank's board following the resignation of Alessandro Profumo last July, will officially take office on 22 September. Former manager of Goldman Sachs and former president of Borsa Italiana and Prysmian, he will lead the fortunes of the Sienese bank in the future, taking responsibility for facing important challenges, first of all the merger plan promoted by the ECB.
His candidacy for president was proposed by the Mps Foundation, Fintech and Btg Pactual which continues to hold the shareholding structure of Monte dei Paschi despite a syndicated share that has fallen to 0,49% (the overall shares are however stable at 9,12%. The Ministry of the Economy was also present at the meeting, a shareholder of Mps with 4% of the capital, which however did not participate in the vote "in consideration of the particularity of the stake acquired", i.e. as a return of interest on the Monti Bonds and to leave to the other shareholders "the determination on the governance of the bank".
The importance of the aggregation plan was reaffirmed today by the managing director Fabrizio Viola who underlined how “Mps does not have a plan B. The stand-alone industrial plan we have tells us what we must do if an aggregation does not materialize in the short term. But it is difficult to imagine a different fate for the bank".
Nevertheless the times for a merger are not yet predictable. According to Viola, "the Greek crisis, the turbulence in China, and also the Srep evaluation" with which the Eurotower is examining the macro-prudential soundness of the major directly supervised institutions have contributed to lengthening the process.
Early afternoon the Mps share on the Stock Exchange gains 0,85%, to 1,777 euros.
