CashNews.co
By Adria Calatayud
Italy’s UniCredit took a 9% stake in smaller German peer Commerzbank, buying shares from the German government and on the market, and said it would seek regulatory clearance to make further purchases.
The Italian lender, one of the biggest banks in the eurozone, said Wednesday that it would engage with Commerzbank to explore value-creating opportunities and that it would submit regulatory filings for authorization to potentially exceed a 9.9% shareholding.
UniCredit said the regulatory submission aims to maintain flexibility, and that any decision on the stake will depend on the investment meeting its financial parameters.
The move could reignite talk of a potential tie-up between UniCredit and Commerzbank, which has been the subject of speculation in the past and which analysts considered as possible, and of consolidation among European banks more broadly. It comes at a time Spain’s Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria is pursuing a hostile takeover of smaller rival Banco de Sabadell.
UniCredit’s Chief Executive Andrea Orcel earlier this year said his bank was interested in acquisitions, but only if they made sense for shareholders.
The bank said it bought 4.49% of Commerzbank from the German government and the rest through market activity. UniCredit said it supports Commerzbank’s management and supervisory boards and the progress they made in improving the bank’s performance.
The German finance agency earlier on Wednesday said it sold a first block of its crisis-era stake in Commerzbank for 702 million euros, reducing its shareholding to 12% from 16.49%. The entire package of shares was sold to UniCredit, which outbid all other offers, the agency said.
The move comes after Commerzbank said late Tuesday that Chief Executive Manfred Knof would step down from his position after his contract runs out at the end of 2025.
The German government sold its shares in Commerzbank at 13.20 euros each, a premium to the bank’s closing price of 12.60 euros on Tuesday, the agency said. The government remains the largest shareholder in Commerzbank after the sale, it said.
Last week, the German government outlined plans to begin a process to exit the stake it built in Commerzbank during the financial crisis of 2008, the latest move by a European government to offload stakes in banks they took seeking to stabilize their financial systems.
“Commerzbank has shown to be standing firmly on its own feet again,” said Eva Grunwald, member of the executive board of Germany’s finance agency.
The agency said it had committed to a 90-day restriction on sales of further shares, with certain exceptions that weren’t detailed.
Write to Adria Calatayud at [email protected]
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 11, 2024 03:20 ET (07:20 GMT)
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