Faced with the difficulty of recapitalising and definitively securing the two Veneto banks, the Treasury is currently considering changing its game plan and drawing inspiration from the model previously tested to save Banca Etruria, Banca Marche, Carife and Carichieti.
The first step of this new paradigm, which could materialize in a very short time, is the idea of set up a bad bank that collects all NPLs of the two institutes and separate them from the ordinary business, significantly reducing the capital requirement.
Secondly the Treasury is thinking of pass the merger plan to facilitate the purchase of each of the two individual banks once they have been freed from the burden of non-performing loans.
Faced with this new scheme, at least one of the banks (Intesa Sanpaolo) which had said it was willing to lend a hand to Popolare di Vicenza and Veneto Banca, would no longer participate in the private capital increase, but would advance an offer to directly take over one of the two troubled institutions. A similar solution is currently at the center of reflections also by Unicredit and Bnl Bnp Paribas.
However, direct detection should deal with three problems that are not easy to solve: 1) who pays the bad bank? On this level, the possibility of an intervention by the interbank guarantee fund seems to emerge. 2) How long will it take to get a new one authorization from Brussels and Frankfurt to the new project? However, the freezing of the Veneto Banca bond, whose decree is currently being examined by Parliament, would make the rescue times less stringent. 3) How to deal with redundancies What would emerge if one of the major national banks, already present in the north-east, decided to buy Popolare di Vicenza or Veneto Banca? From this point of view, the Government's idea of refinancing the redundancy fund for bank workers could represent a concrete solution.
