Business is business in spite of consistency. It wasn't long ago when Diego Della Valle, the Gascon he likes to be, thundered against the president of Intesa Sanpaolo, Giovanni Bazoli contemptuously calling him a "sparkly old man" and attacked even more heavily the president of FCA, John Elkann, judging him " an inadequate boy” for the tasks that the Agnelli family had reserved for him.
Yesterday Della Valle pretended to suddenly forget the recent past and joined the single list promoted by Mediobanca for the renewal of the board at the RCS shareholders' meeting in April. The list, which was joined by all of RCS's major shareholders except for the heirs of the Rotelli family and Urbano Cairo, represents 38,9% of the capital and takes the form of an agreement valid until the shareholders' meeting.
The objective of the list is to bring engineer Maurizio Costa, current president of Italian publishers (Fieg) and former CEO of Mondadori, to the presidency of RCS, and to confirm Scott Jovane as CEO of the publishing group.
Probably Della Valle, who recently admitted that he had made a mistake in investing in RCS because the other shareholders in the publishing company never let him touch the ball, even though with his partner Luca di Montezemolo he has in the past helped to oust a CEO like Vittorio Colao to replace him with a decadent gentleman from Palermo like Antonello Perricone, realized that not entering the Meddiobanca list would have isolated him even more. And he preferred to swallow a few bitter pills so as not to lose the opportunity for a convenient compromise.
In addition to finalizing the sale of Rcs Libri to Mondadori and developing the digitization of the group, the new RCS board of directors will find itself, among the first commitments, having to choose the successor of Ferruccio de Bortoli as director of Corriere della Sera
