A separate peace
After months of haggling, the Polish government and Unicredit finally reached an agreement in the battle over the merger of banks Pekao and BPH last Thursday. The government managed to sign the agreement before the end of the meeting of the Banking Supervision Commission (KNB) on Wednesday, which was to decide whether the merger could go through.
The long-awaited agreement between Unicredit and the Polish government allows the banking group to complete the Polish part of its takeover of the German bank HVB. Unicredit's Polish arm Pekao will now merge with BPH to create Central Europe's largest lender, overtaking PKO BP.
However, Unicredit will only merge 280 out of the total 480 BPH units with Pekao, with the remaining units and the BPH brand to be listed for sale in an international tender. It is still not clear when the division of BPH will take place. "It will be a complicated process," president of Unicredit, Alessandro Profumo said. The deal also stipulates that the Italians will not fire any workers from either Pekao or BPH within the next two years.
"We have achieved all our goals - the BPH brand will not disappear, the new bank will not have a dominant position on the market and the employees have their jobs guaranteed," Deputy Treasury Minister Paweł Szałamacha said.
"This is an agreement which is positive for Poland, our customers and our employees and for Unicredito," Profumo said. However, analysts claim that it is the Italians who came out victorious as they achieved their main goal, making only minor concessions. Selling off some BPH branches to cut costs was Unicredit's intention from the very beginning. The government's major achievement are the job guarantees.
The agreement still leaves a number of important questions unanswered - such as how BPH assets and clients will be divided or whether the clients will have a choice as to which bank they want to join.
However, the agreement between Poland and Unicredit doesn't mean that the row between Poland and the European Commission over state interventionism in financial sectors has come to an end. The European Commission's competition spokesperson Jonathan Todd said the deal would not end the anti-trust division's proceedings against Poland.
