“Turning off the lights on the vote count, it is time for a meditated balance sheet on the outcome of the shareholders’ meeting that appointed the new board of directors of Assicurazioni Generali. And the first observation is that in its history the governing body of the company, which has always been an expression of very broad consensus, never took office in the name of such a narrow majority, barely 55% of the participants in the assembly, moreover in the face of a vote of no confidence of nearly 45% “. This is what Osvaldo De Paolini writes in an editorial for “Il Messaggero”, underlining how it was “a debut not exactly under the best auspices, considering that as soon as the votes linked to the often mentioned Mediobanca securities loan fall, support for the board of directors headed by chief executive Philippe Donnet will be reduced to just over 50% “. “And there is another issue that must make us reflect – emphasizes the Roman daily – the origin of the votes and their distribution between one list and another. Yesterday, from the analysis of the vote, a clear division emerged, which sees on the one hand the compact block of international funds deployed with Mediobanca (for a share capital equal to 39%) and on the other hand a strong concentration of the historical shareholder structure of the company (for a share capital equal to 30%) which, by voting for the Caltagirone list, he demonstrated that he shares the choice of discontinuity contained in the strategic Awakening the Lion project “. “So, while on the one hand we have witnessed a compacting of the financial front, on the other there has been an extraordinary mobilization of investors who invest on their own, industrial families, banking foundations, pension funds, large and small drawer holders: in short, categories of shareholders who have chosen to focus on Generali with a long-term perspective, knowing well the potential of the group. And the common feature is that these shareholders are all Italian …. – concludes De Paolini – It is therefore good to reiterate that in addition to the interests of 190,000 shareholders (65% of which based in Italy), the fate of almost 75,000 employees and the protection of 63 billion euros of Italian public debt held in its portfolio, at stake is the essential need to to bring Generali back to the European podium, under penalty of its progressive irrelevance on the world scene “.