Word: banca
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...Spaghetti Junction" - has made it difficult for outside investors such as fund managers, corporate raiders or acquisitive foreign companies to gain power within Italian firms. For decades, Mediobanca has been very much the senior partner in this arrangement. The bank was founded in 1946 as an offshoot of Banca Commerciale Italiana, one of the grandes dames of Italian finance, to provide medium-term credit to industry during postwar reconstruction. Mediobanca steadily built relation- ships and acquired shares, winning seats in the county's top boardrooms. By the 1980s, it was said that practically any deal in Italy needed the blessing...
...Tomaso and Anna Longo took out a loan with the Banca di Roma to buy a two-bedroom house in the fashionable Prati section near the heart of Rome. The interest was a painful 12.5%, but the Longos had little alternative, since that was about the average rate on a home mortgage in those days. Anna, a civil servant, says that life became a matter of pinching lire. "We couldn't ever go away anywhere," she recalls. "We didn't even go out to the cinema...
...Then a miracle happened. Italy's efforts to join the euro led to a steep drop in interest rates. By April 1998 the market average for new loans had fallen below 8.3%. Tomaso, a lawyer, noticed that this appeared to render his Banca di Roma loan illegal under a 1996 anti-usury act. The law prohibits creditors from charging more than one-and-a-half times current rates. Tomaso went to the bank and asked to renegotiate; he first was turned down, and then the bank offered a deal with a hefty refinancing fee. But the Longos kept pushing...
...Banco Central Hispano. This was followed by the $18 billion bid by Societe Generale, one of France's largest retail banks, with Paribas, the country's leading investment bank. During a sleepy Italian weekend in March, Unicredito, based in Milan, launched a $16 billion bid to buy northern rival Banca Commerciale Italiana, perhaps Italy's most prestigious banking brand. Only a few hours later, San Paulo-IMI, which had become the country's largest commercial bank through an earlier merger, announced a $9.7 billion offer for Banca di Roma, which has a strong retail network in Italy's central region...
...para acabar completa, la banca le manda carta...