(Bloomberg) -- The Italian government is growing concerned about the prospect of an increased French presence in its finance industry, with two major deals in the works that could potentially reshape the market.
Officials in Rome are looking at steps they could take to maintain Italian influence in a potential tie-up between insurer Assicurazioni Generali SpA and Paris-based Natixis Investment Managers, according to people familiar with the matter. The two companies have been discussing combining their asset management operations and executives at Generali are aiming to clinch a preliminary agreement by the end of next month, Bloomberg has reported.
At the same time, Credit Agricole SA has become a key player in the tussle over the future of Banco BPM SpA, Italy’s third-largest bank, raising its stake to 15.1% in response to a takeover bid from UniCredit SpA. That’s another unwanted complication for Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s team as they try to develop their own strategy for the banking industry.
A spokesperson for Meloni declined to comment.
Government officials across the European Union are on edge at the prospect of a wave of consolidation in the finance industry. Reducing the fragmentation in the EU’s financial markets is a key part of the bloc’s strategy to compete with the US and China and, over time, it could make the EU better able to resist a trade offensive from incoming US President Donald Trump.
But changes in the structure of the industry are almost bound to create winners and losers among national governments, and that’s holding back deals. The German government this week essentially told UniCredit to sell its stake in Commerzbank AG as officials in Berlin try to deter UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel from launching a full takeover bid for the country’s second-biggest publicly listed lender.
One major issue with the Natixis-Generali deal is that the Italian insurer is one of the biggest holder of Italian sovereign bonds, the people familiar with the thinking in Rome said, asking to not be named speaking about private matters. Meloni has seen the perceived risk of Italian debt decline during her two years in power, but with government borrowing at more than 130% of GDP, officials are sensitive to any shifts that might jeopardize that hard-won stability.
Depending on the final structure of the Natixis-Generali deal, one option available to Meloni would be to use the so-called “Golden Power” provision in Italian law, which allows the government to block or impose conditions on deals involving strategic assets, the people said. They stressed that they aren’t taking any concrete action as yet and officials were evaluating several different scenarios.
Meloni already used her golden power prerogative last year, when her government imposed restrictions on tiremaker Pirelli & C. SpA’s largest investor, China’s Sinochem International Corp., to limit access to information from sensors in Pirelli tires.
In general, officials in Rome are wary of what broad consolidation may mean for Italy if the ownership of financial and industrial assets is concentrated in France and Germany, they added.
On the face of it, Italy stands to gain from a potential UniCredit acquisition of Commerzbank, which Rome has backed. But that move has stirred things up within the European banking industries in ways that have been unsettling for Meloni’s administration all the same.
After the German government stated its opposition to the deal, UniCredit launched a bid for Milan-based Banco BPM. That’s an all Italian deal, of course, but it also interferes with a plan supported by the League, Meloni’s junior coalition partner, to create another large banking group in Italian by merging BPM with Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA.
--With assistance from Tommaso Ebhardt.
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