monte paschi offering to buy mediobanca in an allshare deal.ove confirming bloomberg earlier scoop. let's bring in our managing editor for southern europe. the scoop from your team has been confirmed. what do we know about this potential tie up? >> we know that we didn't sleep too much last night. we managed to report the news first. it is quite a big surprise because monte paschi is smaller than mediobanca which is a larger rival. auntie paske is coming out from a long restructuring process. the italian government is still the biggest investor while mediobanca is seen as the leading investment bank in the country. somehow a surprise move. what is not surprising is that mediobanca and paschi shares investors. the billionaire delvecchio family. they are the biggest, together, the biggest investors in mediobanca. and recently, they moved on pa schi, about 9%. the italian billionaire families could play a key role in such a move. we have to see which will be the market response, the mediobanca response to an unsolicited offer. this is just a new c

monte dei paschi has launched a takeover bid for the italian investment bank mediobanca, potentiallyleting a deal by the third quarter of this year. and this is a very important story because it is important from a background in terms of monte dei paschi di siena, but also in the context of the consolidation, the active consolidation efforts we are witnessing in italy in terms of monte dei paschi, it is important to keep in mind that not too long ago, this was the troubled bank in italy. it went through a bailout program back in 2017, and now there's a bit of a turnaround story where they're actually making an offer to another bank to become even bigger in the italian banking sector. and from a consolidation perspective, this is just another episode in this very active moment that we are witnessing and potential consolidation for italian banking. we have, let's not forget, bpm increasing their stake in monte dei paschi late last year. we have, of course, unicredit. that who has also made a bid for bpm as well. so let's see how this will continue to unfold for the time being. it is un