The Gloves Are Coming Off in Europe’s Biggest Banking Takeover
After high-level deal talks between UniCredit and Commerzbank broke down, the Italian lender is taking its pitch directly to shareholders
The headquarters of Commerzbank AG, center, in Frankfurt, Germany,
Photographer: Alex Kraus/BloombergThe handshake on March 26 was cordial. After more than a year of increasingly rancorous back and forth, Andrea Orcel, the chief executive officer of UniCredit SpA, and Bettina Orlopp, his counterpart at Commerzbank AG, had finally come together to discuss what a potential combination might look like.
Over the course of two meetings, each lasting more than two hours, Orcel indicated he wanted Commerzbank to focus more on Germany and Poland and scale back lending in other parts of the world, which he considered risky, according to people familiar with the matter. Orlopp disagreed with the numbers presented by the Italian and pushed back against his proposal for joint working groups to address differences, wary of giving too much information to a rival who had taken the bank’s stakeholders by surprise before, the people said.