Generali, Crt will support Costamagna with Caltagirone? Facts and puffs
What is said and rumored between Crt, Caltagirone and Del Vecchio about the Caltagironian name of Costamagna for the presidency of Generali
Claudio Costamagna to the presidency of Generali?
The banker, former president of CDP, would be – according to rumors published today by the newspaper La Stampa – one of the leading names on the Caltagirone list, whose composition remains largely unknown.
Another name that at a certain point had started to turn was that of Fabrizio Palermo, until recently CEO of CDP and now consultant of Caltagirone's own for the strategic plan of Generali (but in the M5s house, especially the former premier Giuseppe Conte, would like him at the top of Fincantieri in place of Giuseppe Bono, moved to the presidency of the shipbuilding giant controlled by Cdp Industria).
However, it is the figure of Costamagna who has caused more than one nose to curl up in the palaces of finance (not only in Milan) and politics (not only in Rome).
Several observers return in these hours with the memory of the singular ways in which Costamagna, as president of the CDP (controlled by the Ministry of Economy), ceded the Italian Strategic Fund to Maurizio Tamagnini, up to then part of the same CDP.
“Like the privatizations in Yeltsin's Russia” is the sarcastic joke that describes the ritual story.
"The super banker with twenty years on his shoulders in Goldman Sachs, a great friend of Romano Prodi, forgets his role in Maurizio Tamagnini's Italian Strategic Fund, the one that Costamagna himself helped with 500 million euros in 2017", remarked the La Verità newspaper after a fluvial interview with Corriere della Sera .
Furthermore, many of the equity intertwining that today is so difficult to dissolve dates back to Costamagna's season in CDP.
Just think of Tim, in which CDP entered with a blitz – wanted by the then Gentiloni government – also to protect Silvio Berlusconi's group (it was rumored at the time) from the all-out offensive by Vincent Bolloré, then at very short irons with Berlusconi, and who has been experiencing painful crumpling in the stock market for many months now.
Unforgettable, then, remain the continuous sudden utterances of Costamagna, always ready to guarantee (in words) the entry of Cdp into the shareholding of companies in black crisis: Alitalia, Ilva and several others, and never mind if it was the statute of Cdp itself. to ban it.
Obviously, every time the former number one of the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti ventured into these fancy flights, to the foundations, minority shareholders of the CDP, his heart jumped.
Even in the Crt foundation, the good parlor that also lined up alongside Leonardo Del Vecchio and Caltagirone), the choice aroused discussions, as recently also underlined by Affari & Finanza, the insert of the newspaper Repubblica .
Costamagna is known for the great successes of Goldman Sachs as a banker, linked in particular to the season of Italian privatizations, when Costamagna took Romano Prodi, for a long time at the head of IRI, as senior advisor to Goldman.
But in Turin, as in all the banking foundations, they recall with some unease mixed with disappointment the debut of the Costamagna presidency in the CDP.
At the time, in fact, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi removed the incumbent president, Franco Bassanini, without too many compliments, violating the golden rule according to which the CDP president is expressed by banking foundations and not by the government.
So what will the Turin body do at the Generali assembly that will decide the fate of the current number one Philippe Donnet on which Mediobanca continues to focus?
The first option coincides with abstention. The choice is drastic but it would give CRT the role of "arbiter" typical of banking foundations.
The second option is to support the Assogestioni list, and it is a possibility that not even the Benettons have so far rejected, even if in Assogestioni itself the direction of travel is not yet clear and discussions are not lacking ( as reconstructed here by Start Magazine ).
The third option is to join the Caltagirone list, but in Crt it is preferred to wait for the outcome of the checks by Consob, called into question by Generali themselves to exclude the existence of a concert between Caltagirone, Del Vecchio and Crt itself.
Just as Caltagirone expects a positive outcome from Consob on the controversial Mediobanca securities loan .
See you on the next episode on the Lion.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/generali-crt-sosterra-costamagna-con-caltagirone-fatti-e-sbuffi/ on Tue, 08 Mar 2022 12:08:55 +0000.