PORTUGUESE CONSTRUCTION mogul, Pedro Teixeira Duarte, is trying to find a solution to the power struggle crisis tearing apart shareholder confidence at Portugal’s most important bank, Millennium bcp.
Teixeira Duarte, who holds eight per cent of the shares in Banco Comercial Português, believes that the crisis will only abate with the exit of the bank’s Chief Executive Officer Paulo Teixeira Pinto who has been locked in a deadly power struggle with its chairman and founder Jorge Jardim Gonçalves.
The bank’s CEO admitted last week that he would only quit his lucrative post if Jardim Gonçalves would equally accept to resign as Chairman of the bank’s Supervisory Board of Directors – the organisation which administers the largest private bank in Portugal. However, Jardim Gonçalves said on Friday that reports he would be prepared to quit the Supervisory Board “were absolutely untrue and unfounded”.
The name most mooted to take over from Paulo Teixeira Pinto as CEO of Millennium bcp is its Vice President Felipe Pinhal who could substitute him until March 2008.
Apart from this solution, another possibility is for both Jardim Gonçalves and Paulo Teixeira Pinto to present a united proposal for the bank in terms of policy at its General Assembly meeting on August 27.
The negotiations headed by Pedro Teixeira Duarte aim to reach an agreement with shareholders that oppose Jardim Gonçalves, claiming he is dividing bcp’s capital and its management organisation. But Jardim Gonçalves claims that the crisis at bcp will only end with Paulo Teixeira Pinto’s decision to quit the bank’s Board of Directors.
A lobby of key shareholders backed by Jorge Jardim Gonçalves and Pedro Teixeira Duarte want Paulo Teixeira Pinto removed because of his failure to secure Millennium bcp’s take-over bid for the Banco Português de Investimento (BPI), which would have consolidated the bank’s position in the European market making it too strong to be the object of a foreign take-over bid. Bcp shares currently stand at 3.43 euros.
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