Banca Carige may rejoin race for merger with BPM
Banca Carige [BIT: CRG], the Italian lender, could rejoin the race for a merger with fellow lender Banca Popolare di Milano (BPM) [BIT: PMI], Italian language daily Il Messaggero reported.
The unsourced article said that an extraordinary meeting of the BPM supervisory board, that would also include the management board, on 23 December could open the way for Banca Carige to re-emerge as a candidate.
The report noted Banca Carige is believed to have dropped out of the race leaving only UBI Banca [BIT: UBI] and Banco Popolare [BIT: BP] as the remaining suitors. However, the item said that Piero Lonardi, who represents BPM's non-employee shareholders, asked for the merger process to be slowed down to allow the possibility of Banca Carige to rejoin the process.
The report noted that this led Piero Giarda, the chairman of the supervisory board, to call for the extraordinary meeting.
The item added UBI Banca is believed to have improved its original offer for BPM, which appeared to the latter as too close to an acquisition rather than a merger of equals. The report said that while UBI is still insisting that the legal headquarters of the merged entity still be in its home city of Bergamo, it is now willing for the merged bank to have two CEOs, of which one would come from BPM. The report said that under the original proposal BPM CEO Giuseppe Castagna would have been given the post of general manager.
BPM has a market cap of EUR 3.939bn.