Carige placed into administration by ECB

(ANSA) - Genoa, January 2 - Troubled Genoa-based bank Carige was placed into extraordinary administration by the European Central Bank Wednesday after most of its board quit after Italy's 10th-biggest bank failed to secure shareholder support for a 400 million euro share issue last month.
    The administrators will be Carige former CEO Fabio Innocenzi, former chairman Pietro Modiano, and Rome Tor Vergata and Luiss universities' lecturer in financial law, Raffaele Lener, the ECB said.
    The ECB said they had been "tasked with safeguarding the stability" of the bank. Bourse regulator CONSOB suspended trading in Carige at the bank's request.
    The European Commission will closely monitor the situation at Carige, an EC spokesman told ANSA Wednesday.
    "As always we closely monitor developments in the EU banking sector, Italy included," the spokesman said.
    "We duly note the ECB's decision, in its capacity as supervisor, to name a temporary administrator for Carige" as one of the moves available thanks to banking union, he said.
    Italian banks have made "significant progress" in recent years, the spokesman added.
    The work must continue but non-performing loans (NPLs) have been substantially reduced, he said.
    Italy's Interbank Deposit Protection Fund (FITD) on Wednesday said Carige needed to merge with another bank to pull it out of its current crisis.
    FITD chief Salvatore Maccarone told ANSA the fund "backed" the ECB's move "because it will serve to carry forward the original plan, a merger with another bank".
    He said the failure of Carige's capital call last month "is proof that the overall governance mechanism has got stuck, and therefore this (ECB-ordered administration) is the only thing that could have been done".
    The ECB's move comes after years of troubles for Italian banks.
    Six small, regional banks have had to be rescued in recent years, with ordinary savers losing billions of euros.
    Big banks also got into trouble with the third-biggest and world's oldest, Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), undergoing precautionary recapitalisation after racking up too many bad loans.
    MPS, founded in 1472, is recovering from its crisis.
    Carige, founded in 1483, has 529 branches across Italy with one branch in France, in Nice.
    About 37.2% branches are located in its home region of Liguria.