“We have been informed of the issues relating to the price in different ways for the two Veneto banks. On Veneto Bank the issue of price is touched upon only in the point I mentioned in the previous hearing, a letter from 2013. In 2015 – when our inspection had already started – we were provided with excerpts from the Bank of Italy's inspection report. On People of Vicenza, on the other hand, we have not received any information on prices from the Bank of Italy”. She said it Angelo Apponi, director general of Consob, during his second hearing before the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the banking system.
“The 2013 communication revealed that Veneto Banca's share price was high, a strong signal that had to be reported to the market and we had this information disseminated through the prospectus – continued Apponi – We read another thing in the report we received in 2015, from which it emerged that the price of the shares of Veneto Banca was determined on the basis of an irrational methodology or in any case with vices. The information is significantly different. We have sanctioned the company for these problems in the evaluation profiles. If we had had this information in 2013, we probably would have moved with other initiatives as well”.
In short, according to Apponi, Consob received from the Bank of Italy in 2013 incomplete information to evaluate the price of the capital increase launched that year by Veneto Banca.
As for subordinated bonds proprietary assets sold directly to customers by the two Venetian banks, the problem underlying the betrayed savings, according to Apponi they were prospectuses not approved by Consob but by another European entity, a procedure permitted by Community legislation. “But we were so alarmed by certain phenomena – underlined the director general of the Commission – that we asked that the powers of emergency intervention be attributed to Consob. The answer we received from the legislator was that we would have to wait for January 3, 2018".
He was also summoned today to a joint hearing together with Apponi Carmelo Barbagallo, head of the banking and financial supervision department of the Bank of Italy. Both had already been heard yesterday in separate sessions. Today the two hearings were transformed into testimony, in accordance with the provisions of the criminal procedure code.
The objective of the face-to-face meeting is to clarify the contradictions that emerged during the first hearings of Barbagallo and Apponi on the controls in Popolare di Vicenza and Veneto Banca. According to Consob, Bank of Italy did not transmit in time the data on the inflated share price that emerged during the inspections of 2001, 2008 and 2009 (irregularities later demonstrated by the 2015 Consob inspection). Via Nazionale claims instead to have always transmitted everything.
"If Bankitalia is right, Consob has slept too long and becomes indefensible, while if the other version holds, the failure to communicate Via Nazionale is enormously serious", argues the secretary and deputy of Civic Choice, Enrico Zanetti, among the members of the commission who have requested the hearing-bis.
We will hear shortly how Bankitalia will reply.
