dd
MILAN, June 23 (Reuters) - Enrico Cuccia, who has died at 92 after long ill health, was a secretive Sicilian wheeler-dealer whose skill in spinning a web of corporate alliances made him the most powerful man in Italian finance for half a century.
The honorary chairman of investment bank Mediobanca <MDBI.MI> masterminded a web of interlocking stakes in top companies including Fiat <FIA.MI>, Pirelli <PIRI.MI> and Europe's third biggest insurer Assicurazioni Generali <GASI.MI> with his bank pulling the strings at the centre.
Mediobanca's magic -- and the power of the banker with the ice blue eyes -- finally began to dim in the mid-1990s as Italy's capital markets evolved with the advent of the euro.
But his death leaves a void at the centre of Italian finance and is likely to unleash a battle for control of Mediobanca, which counts Italian banks UniCredito <CRDI.MI> and Banca di Roma <BRMI.MI> as its largest shareholders.
Cuccia's discretion -- he never gave an interview -- was deeply appreciated by the bank's clients, which have included Fiat, Pirelli, Olivetti <OLIV.MI> and Montedison <MNT.MI>.
In the late 1970s, despite telephone threats and a bomb explosion outside his Milan apartment, Cuccia refused to use his influence to help fellow-Sicilian Michele Sindona following the 1974 collapse of the Franklin National Bank, the biggest banking fraud in U.S. history. Sindona later hanged himself.
Cuccia's famous love of privacy extended to his family life. Only scant biographical details were public knowledge, though his stooped form could often be seen walking to work across a square by Milan's La Scala opera house.
Cuccia's icy manner made him a far cry from the stereotyped expansive Italian but he had a dry sense of humour sufficiently subtle to have earned him the nickname "the British Sicilian".
Asked to describe Cuccia, former Olivetti chief and longtime Mediobanca client Carlo De Benedetti said the banker's main preoccupation in his long career was to protect Mediobanca's independence from the influence of politics and big industry.
"He's intelligent and enriched with wit, curiosity and an extraordinary memory, but can also be vicious and ruthless when he needs to be," De Benedetti said in his 1999 book "For Now".
"He has the morals of a medieval monk -- one of those monks that can also kill for a good cause," he said.
Fiat honorary chairman Gianni Agnelli perhaps summed up Cuccia's power best in one of his characteristic one-liners: "What Cuccia wants, God wants too."
LIFETIME IN BANKING
After taking a law degree, Cuccia began his professional career at the Bank of Italy in 1932, joining the state holding company IRI [IRII.UL] in 1934 when Italy was still under the Fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini.
He was hired by Banca Commerciale Italiana <BIN.MI> in 1938, becoming joint central manager in 1943. He married the daughter of his former boss IRI chairman Alberto Beneduce, the unusually named Nuova Idea Socialista (New Socialist Idea), in 1939.
According to his biographers, Cuccia's vision of an Italian merchant bank at the service of northern industry was forged in his travels to the United States during the war.
Mediobanca's long-standing alliance with Lazard Freres, though rumoured to be in difficulty, dates from that time.
Mediobanca was created in 1946 as a state-controlled long-term lending institute, born of a 1936 law barring commercial banks from taking direct equity stakes in companies and giving the government a monopoly on long-term loans.
While the initial idea was to finance Italy's post-war reconstruction, Cuccia soon prised the bank away from state control and built Mediobanca into what has been called "the smart drawing room" of Italian capitalism.
There, Italy's family-owned firms sorted out their finances away from the scrutiny of the press and the demands from minority shareholders.
Cuccia's most famous remark -- "shares are weighed, not counted" -- encapsulated his genius at using shareholders' pacts simultaneously to defend companies from takeover and to control them with only a small amount of capital.
Despite the bank's reputation as being old-fashioned and preferring closed-door deals to the free market, Mediobanca has begun to take advantage of new business opportunities since the 1990s offered by privatisations and takeovers.
Cuccia was born in Rome on November 24, 1907. He is survived by two
daughters and a son. His wife died in 1996.
__________________________________________________________________________
______
---------------------------------------------------------
This email is confidential to the ordinary user of the
e-mail address to which it was addressed. If you are not
the intended recipient, please notify the sender
immediately on (44) 20 7638 5858 and delete the message
from all locations in your computer. You should not copy
this email or use it for any purpose, or disclose its
contents to any person : to do so may be unlawful.
Email is an informal method of communication and is
subject to possible data corruption, either accidentally
or on purpose. Flemings is unable to exercise control
over the content of information contained in
transmissions made via the Internet. For these reasons
it will normally be inappropriate to rely on information
contained on email without obtaining written confirmation
of it.
----------------------------------------------------------