News

The Italian banking sector is still under heavy restructuring and trade unions are trying to manage the redundancies announced as a consequence of bank strategic plans and of the recent resolution of four medium banks.

While a good agreement was signed last week in Unicredit with the provision of about three thousand early retirements in the next years, the situation is still critical in the other four banks that were declared resolved by the government (about one thousand redundancies had been announced).

In some foreign banks, with reference to their Headquarters in Italy, mainly Barclays and RBS, a few hundred layoffs had been planned.

The general secretary of First-Cisl, Giulio Romani, has strongly criticized the action of the government and the European institutions.

'The position taken by the European Commission," Romani says, "compromised the intervention of the Italian Deposit Guarantee Fund (owned by private banks), that would have made the bank recovery concretely feasible.
The government and Banca d'Italia did choose to write off shares and subordinated bonds, even those owned by retail clients."

At the same time, four new banks were created with the contribution of the national resolution fund, fully financed by Italian banks.

As a concrete proposal, First-Cisl suggests that retail owners of shares and subordinated bonds of the banks that were resolved are to be given shares of the new banks with specific economic rights.

Please find the complete article below.