Monte dei Paschi blows up the mayor. The long wave of internal controversies within the Democratic Party of the city of the Palio over the appointments in the bank and in the Foundation caused the resignation of the mayor of Siena, Franco Ceccuzzi (PD) over the weekend, who was the promoter of the renewal at the top of MPS with the arrival of Alessandro Profumo as president and Viola as managing director. Although Ceccuzzi was elected mayor last year with 54,71% of the votes, on Saturday evening the mayor of Siena had to acknowledge "with regret that in the City Council there is no longer the majority that emerged from the electoral response twelve months ago ”. The former Margherita PDs, who on April 27 had already caused the mayor to lose votes for the approval of the municipal budget, were ready to present a motion of no confidence to put Ceccuzzi on the ropes. The former margheritini reproached the mayor for essentially two things: 1) for having indirectly cornered a ras of the city like the president of the Tuscan regional council, Alberto Monaci, in the bank's new command structures; 2) promote turnover also at the top of the foundation with the defenestration of the outgoing margheritino president Gabriello Mancini.
Beyond the typically Sienese quarrels within the Democratic Party of the city of the Palio, the MPS case is bound to make us think because it is the tip of the iceberg of a relationship between politics, institutions and the bank that has always been distorted. The arrival at the top of Mps of Alessandro Profumo, a banker notoriously allergic to political compromises, only triggered a pathological situation in bank-political relations. What is certain is that an era has ended in Siena and that Monte dei Paschi will no longer be the great mother of the province to which – with disbursements from the Foundation that controlled the bank – it guaranteed a very significant increase in GDP as well as jobs work in the bank, subsidies to the university and sports clubs and so on. The financial crisis and the collapse of MPS's profits, also thanks to the controversial acquisition of Antonveneta at very high prices but above all on the eve of the unpredictable collapse of the markets, have wiped out the resources that the Foundation could collect and distribute. A questionable management of the Foundation itself, to say the least, which did the rest to defend its controlling stake in the bank. Without forgetting the jolt that the investigation by the Public Prosecutor's Office into the Mps and the Foundation gave the bank, politics and the city with sweeping searches and still indecipherable results.
Fortunately at the top of Mps there are now two bankers of the caliber of Profumo and Viola and it is up to them to design the future of the bank. The past will not come back but if the two managers are left free to operate according to the rules of the market and without looking anyone in the eye, the city will also benefit, but first of all it will be the shareholders and all the bank's stakeholders who will reap the benefits.
