Emilio Saracho will be appointed as Banco Popular Chairman at today’s Extraordinary Shareholders’ Meeting. The new chairman (ex-deputy chairman at JP Morgan) will very likely revise the bank’s strategic plan, avoiding a new capital hike at least in the short-term.
For once, BBVA chairman’s words have been a kind of premonition. Last week, when he said rather desperately that “negative interest rates are killing us,” he was not referring to Popular. But the fact remains that a few days later, the bank with Angel Ron at the helm announced a capital hike for 2.5 billion euros, slightly less than half of its stock market value. The aim of the operation is to offset the impact of future regulatory requirements and the shortfall related to the “floor clauses,” calculated at nearly 4.7 billion euros.