Rome, 26 nov (Velino) - Not always, but most of the time the judgement of the markets is the best way to understand the meaning of a new development on the financial scene. And Milan’s Stock Exchange left very few doubts about the fact that it liked the names of the two people chosen by the Appointments Committee of Mediobanca to lead the new Telecom, after the financial earthquake we reported at length during the year. Telecom shares were up 0.8 per cent at 2.1775 and going strong after the announcement that Gabriele Galateri di Genola and Franco Bernabè have been named President and CEO respectively, as French counsellor Vincent Bolloré personally told journalists at the end of the Committee work. The decision was expected, since those names were made quite a few times recently but nobody could be sure until the Committee President Cesare Geronzi, Mr Bolloré, former Telecom President Marco Tronchetti Provera and Unicredit President Dieter Rampl issued their final judgement. Mediobanca is a stakeholder in Telco, the new company which controls 23.6 per cent of Telecom together with Assicurazioni Generali, Intesa Sanpaolo, Benetton and the Spanish Telefònica, after taking over from Pirelli the majority stake of Olimpia. The present President is Pasquale Pistorio who succeeded Guido Rossi (Mr Tronchetti Provera successor) in the frantic period of the discussed Pirelli’s decision to sell Olimpia, the controlling safe box of Telecom, to Telefonica. In the end the present, intensely negotiated financial asset was reached, in order to satisfy Pirelli and Mr Tronchetti Provera requests for a rewarding price, in the context of delicate manoeuvres to keep Telecom under Italian control.

Franco Bernabè, a manager of banking extraction, distinguished himself in ENI and FIAT and now is the President of the holding Fb Group, which he founded, and has already been a Telecom CEO just less than ten years ago. A favoured manager for the Agnelli family, Gabriele Galateri di Genola was with Paolo Fresco at the head of Fiat, in 2000, probably the most difficult period for the Turin carmaker. The he has been Mediobacanca President for four year, until last June. Presently he is vice President of Generali. The public financial scene is still dominated by the Welfare Protocol drama and particularly, in the last few hours, by Lamberto Dini, the former Premier and former Governor of the Bank of Italy, who has just declared that he is not going to vote for a modified text, even if the changes are minor, when the bill arrives in the Senate. And that is some threat, since Mr Dini and his followers mean three votes. And without those, the government would be defeated. If then one takes into consideration the other dissident minority group of the centre left of Willer Bordon and Roberto Manzione, who believe, like Mr Dini, that there is no majority anymore for the government in the Senate, the scenario should really cause some big preoccupation for Prime Minister Romano Prodi. All in all, the missing votes in the Senate would be from seven to eight, according to the last calculation, and that would certainly cause the government collapse: with or without a confidence vote, the proportions of such a defeat would be unbearable.