It is good to see that Italy's banking monolith, Mediobanca, is sticking to its own inimitable style of decision-making. Last week, a small group of Mediobanco directors, who control the bank through a voting pact, were due to meet to decide whether the 80-something-year-old chairman, Francesco Cingano, should be replaced by a younger man who would not be quite so compliant to the conservative line of the bank's chief executive, Vincenzo Maranghi.

. Three of these board members, known as "the bankers", turned up nice and early on Friday morning, but then left inexplicably just before the group of directors known as "the industrialists" appeared around the corner. Then, just as quickly and mysteriously as they vanished, the bankers started to reappear one by one. Soon afterwards, surprisingly, the French financier, Vincent Bolloré, who owns shares in Mediobanca but is not part of the voting pact, emerged to announce to the assembled throng that Cingano will be staying on. It appears that rather than one meeting, there were several held, probably in different smoke-filled rooms in and around the bank. The real shareholders' meeting this week will, of course, have no say in whether the bank gets a new chairman or a different strategy