This is not a good time for UniCredito to be seeing a change at the top, but word came out tonight that CEO Profumo quit. He had been in a pretty heated squabble with the board (obviously...), and it finally comes to a head with him leaving.
It's unfortunate - although UniCredit has clearly been badly hurt in the credit crunch, they are in vast company in that regard. And it should be remembered that during Profumo's tenure at the top, he did guide the company from a conglomeration of unspectacular Italian banks into a sizable pan-European bank with once-promising businesses in Central and Eastern Europe (that could still be worth quite a bit in the future).
Admittedly, I was wrong to be so keen on banks like Societe Generale, Danske Bank, and Unicredito going into the credit crisis; I would have been far better off with banks like Itau (Nasdaq: ITUB), DBS Group (Nasdaq: DBSDY) and Standard. Luckily, SocGen was the only one I actually bought, but still ... knowing your aim was off is not comforting even if you didn't pull the trigger.
I want to write more on this tomorrow ... but suffice it to say for now that this is another challenge for a bank that already has plenty of them.
Disclosure - I own shares of SocGen
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