Sometimes absences are more eloquent than words. It is the case of illustrious absences who registered yesterday in the eagerly awaited meeting of board of RCS, the publishing house of Corriere della Sera and Journal of Sport, led by Urbano Cairo, who is also its main shareholder.
After the Gaetano Miccicchè's resignation in recent days, the Sicilian banker who for many years acted as a link between Cairo and the Intesa Sanpaolo banking group, yesterday the Blackstone effect he pushed three illustrious councilors of RCS onto the Aventine hill XNUMX Diego Della Valle, Marco Tronchetti Provera e Charles Cimbri (the CEO of Unipol), who did not show up at the board meeting. The reasons are circumstantial, but the substance is clear: the growing perplexities in the face of legal case brought by Cairo against the American fund Blackstone for the sale of the historic headquarters of Corrierone di Via Solferino in Milan, but above all the even greater perplexities about Cairo's reluctance to provide special ones provisions in the balance sheet for the eventuality of a legal defeat in front of Blackstone, who asks him $600 million in damages.
This is why the shadow of Blackstone and the ever wider split in the board of directors obscure the discrete financial results: thanks above all to the leap in advertising, a field in which Cairo is a master, Rcs has returned to profit (38,7 million in the first half of 2021) and recorded a 32% increase in revenues, together with a reduction in debt.
Now the ball passes to Consob, which will evaluate the reasons why the RCS board of directors decided not to make prudential anti-Blackstone provisions. But it passes also and above all to the New York Supreme Court, which must decide shortly whether or not it considers itself territorially competent in the RCS-Blackstone case.
