By Giuseppe Fonte<\/p>\n
ROME, April 22 (Reuters) – Italy would be against any decision by UniCredit to move its headquarters or other key offices to Germany as part of a \u200ctakeover of Commerzbank, Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti said, confirming an earlier Reuters report.<\/p>\n
Italy has “golden \u200cpowers” to protect national interests in corporate matters and could use them to set conditions on any Commerzbank deal, including \u200bpreserving registered offices or key management functions in Italy, sources have said.<\/p>\n
“Obviously we would not be in favour of that,” Giorgetti said, when asked about the prospect of UniCredit becoming more German.<\/p>\n
He added, however, that the Milanese bank’s intention to expand in Germany was viewed favourably by the government.<\/p>\n
“We respect UniCredit’s \u200cplan, it is ambitious. In my \u2060view it has an important economic rationale,” Giorgetti told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
UniCredit has sought to dispel concerns, saying it has no \u2060current plans to shift its headquarters.<\/p>\n
“As UniCredit has repeatedly stated, group headquarters are, and will remain, in Italy. There have not been any discussions or indeed requests to the contrary,” a spokesperson said on Wednesday \u200bafter Giorgetti’s \u200bcomments.<\/p>\n
The question of the group’s legal base has long \u200bbeen a stumbling block and is \u200cwidely expected to surface in the talks UniCredit has said it wants to open in the bid for its German rival.<\/p>\n
A person involved in a previous attempt by UniCredit to acquire Commerzbank said the location of a lender’s legal base mattered because it gave governments greater confidence they could exert pressure in times of difficulty.<\/p>\n
Giorgetti said the location of offices was also an issue within Germany, \u200cpitting Munich, where UniCredit’s HVB unit is based, against \u200bFrankfurt, where Commerzbank is headquartered.<\/p>\n
Germany is UniCredit’s biggest foreign market \u200band its weight would increase sharply if \u200bthe Commerzbank deal went ahead.<\/p>\n
Italy last year used its golden powers to \u200cset conditions for UniCredit’s bid for domestic \u200brival Banco BPM, a deal \u200bwhose failure UniCredit blamed on the government.<\/p>\n
Those powers are now at the centre of a dispute with Brussels, which is keen to promote the single market and cross-border banking deals.<\/p>\n
EU \u200bcompetition authorities have opened an \u200cinfringement procedure against Italy, challenging its claim that it can vet banking mergers on \u200bnational security grounds.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Giuseppe Fonte in Rome, additional reporting by Valentina Za in \u200bMilan, editing by Alvise Armellini and Gavin Jones)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Giuseppe Fonte ROME, April 22 (Reuters) – Italy would be against any decision by UniCredit to move…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3487,5,6520,61,6521],"class_list":["post-6811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-commerzbank","tag-germany","tag-giancarlo-giorgetti","tag-italy","tag-unicredit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}