Monte dei Paschi di Siena’s largest shareholder, Delfin, has thrown its weight behind Intesa Sanpaolo’s improved €34.5bn takeover offer, handing Italy’s largest lender a significant boost in its hostile bid to seize control of its Tuscan rival. The board of Delfin, the holding company of the billionaire Del Vecchio family, unanimously backed the offer after Intesa increased the cash component of its bid by €800mn, according to a statement from the bank and people familiar with Delfin’s deliberations. Delfin owns 17.6 per cent of MPS shares.
Intesa’s revised offer values MPS at €34.5bn, including a €3.8bn cash component. On Saturday, the bank said it would increase the cash component by €0.25 to €1.25 per MPS share, while retaining its offer of 1.6 newly issued Intesa shares for each MPS share tendered. The value of Intesa’s offer, first tabled on June 8, has also risen due to a roughly 12 per cent increase in its shares since then.
MPS chief executive Luigi Lovaglio has been trying to fend off Intesa’s hostile takeover while pursuing his own audacious double deal to acquire Banco BPM and Banca Generali, the wealth management arm of insurer Generali. Under Italian takeover rules, the two acquisitions must be approved by MPS shareholders because of Intesa’s competing bid for the Tuscan bank, with a shareholder vote scheduled for the end of this month. Intesa said on Saturday that it would withdraw its offer for MPS if the Tuscan bank’s shareholders vote to proceed with Lovaglio’s competing takeover plan.
The attempted takeover of MPS by Intesa, which would result in a break-up of Italy’s largest bank, has been met with a cool reception from Giorgia Meloni’s government, which still retains a small stake in MPS following its 2017 bailout. Intesa plans to sell a standalone bank including the MPS brand and hundreds of branches to insurer Unipol, while retaining Mediobanca and its 13 per cent stake in Generali. Meloni has publicly criticised the prospect of MPS being “dismembered”, although she has since stressed that its future is a matter for the market.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing