(Adds official confirmation)
By Gianluca Semeraro
MILAN, Oct 25 (Reuters) - The chairman of Italy's Mediobanca will keep his job, a key shareholder said on Friday, as the investment bank's management quashed irate shareholders' latest bid to install more responsive leadership.
Banks UniCredito and Capitalia , key Mediobanca shareholders whose investment banks compete with it, had been pushing to replace Chairman Francesco Cingano amid growing exasperation at the bank's recent conduct.
"Cingano is still chairman," French investor Vincent Bollore told reporters after a meeting of Mediobanca's core shareholders aimed at resolving the weeks-long debate over who should lead the investment bank. Mediobanca later confirmed the appointment.
The two banks are at loggerheads with the bank's Chief Executive Vincenzo Maranghi, who alienated them through Mediobanca's reported role in a boardroom shakeup at Italy's largest insurer Generali .
The shakeup was widely criticised as having more to do with power than creating value.
Mediobanca's surprise grab for the high-profile initial public offering mandate for Ferrari, Fiat's sports car unit, also riled the banks. Many thought the 775.2 million euro ($760 million) price overvalued the sports-car maker.
But rumours of the departure of Maranghi and Cingano in recent years have proven vastly exaggerated as they have been backed by shareholders like Bollore, who has a stake in Consortium, an investment group that has 13.9 percent of Mediobanca.
"I think that everyone appreciates Maranghi's management," said the chairman of French conglomerate Bollore Investissements on Friday.
ANTI-TRUST SCRUTINY
Bollore also said former Treasury undersecretary Piero Giarda, understood to be Capitalia and Unicredito's choice for the chairman's job, "was never officially presented, so there was no vote taken on it."
At 1500 GMT, Mediobanca shares traded down 2.7 percent at 7.41 euros, having fallen as much as 3.4 percent earlier in the day.
The management battle has laid bare simmering tensions over the future of Mediobanca, whose once dominant role in Italian finance has been eclipsed by growing competition and following the death of its legendary founder Enrico Cuccia in 2000.
Most recently Mediobanca has come under scrutiny by anti-trust regulators who suspect it may have too strong a role in the country's insurance sector.
The governor of the Bank of Italy, Antonio Fazio, even weighed in on Mediobanca's future this week, urging the bank's main shareholders to settle their differences in order to preserve the bank's key role in funding corporate Italy.
Earlier this autumn, Maranghi's job was reportedly at risk, but then speculation turned to Cingano and the possibility that he would be replaced by a new chairman who would better look after shareholders' interests.
Bollore, a close ally of fellow shareholder Antoine Bernheim, who took over as Generali's chairman in September, played down talk he and allies who have recently boosted their stakes in Mediobanca, could try to take over Generali through Mediobanca.
"I am just a foreign shareholder, I'm here for the medium term and no ambition in being a director," he said. "We are a financial holding that invests in companies it believes in. Mediobanca is a company we believe in."
Friday's meeting was the latest in a series of gatherings of the bank's key investors before a general Mediobanca shareholders' meeting slated for October 28 -- when the bank is also due to report results for its fiscal first quarter.