Unicredit-BancoBpm, Castagna to employees: '6,000 jobs at risk'

The day after the board of directors that preliminarily rejected UniCredit's offer, Giuseppe Castagna, CEO of BancoBpm, took pen and paper and wrote to employees. "We are a large, independent, Italian bank with a strong vocation for being close to the territories and SMEs, the backbone of our country. We must continue in this direction, staying in the furrow we have traced and continuing to do our job well, as we have always done. This is the right way to grow on our own and not become the subject of transactions that do not take into account the value expressed by our Bank today and, even more so, in the near future," the manager said, commenting on UniCredit's takeover bid.

Castagna then sounded the alarm on the employment repercussions of a merger with UniCredit: 'The cost synergies estimated by the bidder, amounting to more than one third of BancoBpm's cost base, which, it can be estimated, would mean staff cuts of more than 6,000 colleagues, also cause great concern'.

"The year 2024 was an extraordinary year for us, marking an important chapter in our history" as "the objectives achieved" such as "the third-quarter results, the Opa on the entirety of Anima's shares" and the acquisition of 5% of Mps "have strengthened our positioning, laying the foundations for a future of further growth", Castagna continues. "We find ourselves in a moment of great importance for our group, a historical passage that sees us as active players on the market, as demonstrated by the recent events concerning our bank," explains the CEO. "Perhaps it is also for these reasons that we find ourselves today having to comment on an operation that has not been agreed with the bank and at price conditions that are unusual for this type of operation.

On the offer of UniCredit also intervenes the president of Abi, Antonio Patuelli: whether the operation is positive or not 'will be decided by the market and the European supervisory authorities. I read, study and keep quiet,' he said on the sidelines of the Payments Fair. 'It is the market, it is the shareholders, the directors and the supervisors who decide,' Patuelli continued. "Everyone else can say anything freely," he continued, "but I do not take part in the political debate and I say nothing, because I am not a shareholder in these banks, I am not a supervisor, I am not an authority, neither political nor judicial.

Interviewed by Rtl 102.5 on the Unicredit-BancoBpm takeover bid, the minister of infrastructure and vice-premier Matteo Salvini reiterated that 'Unicredit now has little that is Italian: the Italian shareholder base is the minority of the minority. It is a bank controlled by foreigners'. According to the minister, for Unicredit 'to go and buy up other Italian banks and then perhaps go and close branches and lay off people in Italy and transfer Italian savings abroad, allow me as a minister and as an Italian to defend the remaining Italian character of the Italian banking system'. Therefore, concluded Salvini, 'we have a duty to defend the savings of Italians and the jobs of Italians. This is true for the auto sector, for the agricultural sector for all sectors put at risk by some European regulations and in this case by some financial operations that do not respond to Italian interests, so much so that yesterday the board of directors of the Banca popolare di Milano said 'no thank you''.