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Monte dei Paschi di Siena has launched a €13.3bn takeover offer for larger rival Mediobanca in a move that would shake up Italy’s banking sector.
The offer, announced on Friday, values Milanese group Mediobanca’s shares at €15.99 each, a 5 per cent premium to their closing price on Thursday.
Tuscany’s MPS has a market capitalisation of about €9bn while Mediobanca’s equity is worth €12.7bn.
The move by MPS comes at a crucial time in the Italian banking sector with a series of mergers and acquisitions under way that would reframe the country’s financial sector.
MPS said in a statement that it expected a tie-up to generate €700mn a year in pre-tax synergies. The deal “aims to deliver significant profitability levels and to maintain a solid capital position”, it added.
Under the terms of the offer, Mediobanca investors would receive 23 new shares in MPS for every 10 Mediobanca shares they hold.
The Italian government, which bailed out MPS in 2017, remains the bank’s largest shareholder but has reduced its stake over the past year as the shares more than doubled in value following a turnaround led by chief executive Luigi Lovaglio.
In the latest stake sale in November it sold shares to Delfin, the billionaire Del Vecchio family’s holding company, and Roman building tycoon Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone, whose son now sits on MPS’s board. Delfin has since tripled its stake to just under 10 per cent while Caltagirone holds 5 per cent.
The Del Vecchios and Caltagirone are also the largest shareholders in Mediobanca, with combined stakes of close to 30 per cent, and have been at odds with its chief executive Alberto Nagel for years.
The Italian government had hoped to merge MPS with Banco BPM to create a domestic banking champion to compete with larger rivals Intesa Sanpaolo and UniCredit.
But those plans were thwarted after UniCredit, which is also pursuing a merger with German rival Commerzbank, launched a “hostile” takeover offer for Banco BPM in November, which BPM is attempting to fend off.
The upheaval also extends to the country’s insurance and asset management sectors. Banco BPM has launched a takeover offer of its own for local asset manager Anima.
Meanwhile insurer Generali, where Mediobanca is the largest shareholder, announced this week that it was joining forces with France’s Natixis to create a European asset management giant. The move was criticised by Rome which raised concerns over the possibility of Italian savings being managed abroad and the risk of capital flight from the country.
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