On the move: Braggiotti |
On Thursday 28 October, Vincenzo Maranghi was in full conciliatory flow. The chief executive of Mediobanca told his shareholders' annual assembly that the bank had only friends. Relations with the Agnelli family of Turin were "extraordinary". There was no rift with the Lazard group either. And Mediobanca wouldn't dream of trying to control the affairs of its own largest shareholder, Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI). The notion that Mediobanca had been fighting wars on several fronts was invented by Maranghi's pet hate: the press. The lanky chief executive used the colourful word untorelli, an untranslatable literary reference likening journalists to malicious spreaders of the bubonic plague in 16th-century Milan.
In reality, Maranghi has not so much won friends this year as battered all his enemies into weary submission with a series of vintage intrigues. The only part of Mediobanca accumulating friends is the section that does conventional investment banking in open markets. "The fact is that they are the best in Italy," says a senior banker from a global house who has worked with Mediobanca on equity deals.