{"id":230881,"date":"2025-07-02T02:43:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-02T02:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/230881\/"},"modified":"2025-07-02T02:43:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T02:43:11","slug":"eu-frets-over-government-meddling-in-spanish-italian-banking-mergers-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/230881\/","title":{"rendered":"EU frets over government meddling in Spanish, Italian banking mergers \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rome did so by invoking its \u201cgolden power,\u201d which was originally designed to stop foreign takeovers from threatening national security. That <\/strong>move did not go unnoticed in Brussels, where officials opened two distinct probes into the matter, led respectively by the financial services and the competition directorates. It has also triggered an exchange under the EU Pilot, and the Commission \u201cis now assessing the reply of Italian authorities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Competition officials in Brussels cleared the deal with conditions on June 19, rejecting Rome\u2019s request to hand the deal back to the national antitrust authority.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Competition officials also sent Rome a set of questions on its \u201cgolden power,\u201d a Commission spokesperson told POLITICO, explaining that only in \u201cexceptional\u201d circumstances can a government interfere with a Brussels merger decision. National interventions in mergers aiming to protect a \u201clegitimate interest,\u201d they said, should be \u201cappropriate, proportionate and non-discriminatory.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"The government of Giorgia Meloni has saddled UniCredit\u2019s bid for rival Banco BPM with so many conditions that UniCredit now says it makes no sense to proceed. | Michael Nguyen\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

There are broader concerns over Rome\u2019s entanglements in the banking sector. Government officials have spoken privately of the need to build up a third force in Italian banking that would act as a counterweight to the dominant duo of UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, which they hope would bolster credit access for the small firms and households that make up a sizable bulk of the ruling coalition\u2019s electoral base.<\/p>\n

According to Rome insiders<\/a>, the government wants to build this \u201cthird pole\u201d around Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), which has been under effective government control since the last in a series of expensive bailouts in 2017. The Commission only approved that bailout on the condition<\/a> that Rome reduce its influence over the bank as quickly as practicable. With the conditions having been fulfilled, MPS is now on the hunt for acquisitions \u2014 with the backing of the government, which is still its largest shareholder, owning an 11.7 percent stake.<\/p>\n

At first, Meloni\u2019s government aimed to merge MPS with BPM, which bought a large stake in the Tuscan lender last year. When that was derailed by UniCredit, the government changed tack, supporting a surprise \u20ac12.5 billion bid by MPS for Milan-based investment bank Mediobanca. The target rejected<\/a> the offer outright as having \u201cno industrial rationale\u201d and as being structured so as to create significant conflicts of interest at the shareholder level \u2014 an implicit complaint about the offer\u2019s political dimensions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rome did so by invoking its \u201cgolden power,\u201d which was originally designed to stop foreign takeovers from threatening…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230882,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[3427,90725,331,2000,299,5187,1699,1945,1824,50872,2199,6316,5338,104,47982,52824],"class_list":{"0":"post-230881","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-banking","9":"tag-banking-union","10":"tag-banks","11":"tag-eu","12":"tag-europe","13":"tag-european","14":"tag-european-union","15":"tag-friedrich-merz","16":"tag-germany","17":"tag-italian-politics","18":"tag-italy","19":"tag-mergers-and-acquisitions","20":"tag-pedro-sanchez","21":"tag-spain","22":"tag-spanish-politics","23":"tag-state-aid"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114781343450297934","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230881\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}