(Bloomberg) -- Banco BPM SpA Chief Executive Officer Giuseppe Castagna warned employees that almost a third of them may be at risk of losing their jobs if the lender gets bought by its larger domestic rival UniCredit SpA.
The expected cost savings that UniCredit announced when it unveiled an unsolicited takeover bid for Banco BPM two days ago “can be estimated to mean staff cuts of over 6,000 colleagues,” Castagna said in a letter sent to employees on Wednesday that was seen by Bloomberg. That prospect is a matter of “great concern,” he said.
Banco BPM has roughly 20,000 employees.
Castagna’s memo to staff comes a day after Banco BPM’s board rebuffed the approach from UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel, saying the offer wasn’t agreed on in advance, was too low, and would likely cost jobs and hamper competition in Italy.
Milan-based UniCredit on Monday offered 0.175 newly-issued share for each share in its crosstown rival. That would value Banco BPM at roughly €9.5 billion ($10 billion) at Tuesday’s closing prices, a level significantly below the lender’s current market capitalization of €10.6 billion.
As part of the offer, UniCredit said it estimates a takeover would yield a reduction of €900 million in the combined entities’ annual costs, which would partly be achieved through “training and re-skilling programs.” Banco BPM last year had operating expenses of €2.57 billion.
Castagna also said that UniCredit’s approach is effectively tying Banco BPM’s hands in its pursuit of asset manager Anima Holding SpA, which it unveiled just a couple of weeks earlier.
The bid from Orcel has triggered a so-called passivity rule for Banco BPM. The rule stipulates that the target company can’t take strategic actions including a change of governance, capital increases or mergers that could impact the proposed deal and hasn’t been agreed before.
The Wednesday letter from Castagna resembles warnings from German labor unions in the wake of UniCredit’s surprise approach in September on one of the country’s largest lenders, Commerzbank AG. An acquisition of Commerzbank could result in “disaster” for employment, one union representative warned at the time.
We are “on the right path for growing on our own, rather than becoming the object of operations that do not take into account the value expressed by our bank today and, even more so, in the near future,” Banco BPM’s Castagna said in the letter.
(Updates with deal valuation in fifth paragraph and context in following paragraphs.)
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