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 Giarda, 77, is a university professor who served as parliamentary
affairs minister in Italy's technocrat cabinet headed by Mario Monti
between 2011 and 2012.
Popolare Milano needs to boost its capital base to get ready for a
euro zone-wide bank health check, to be carried out by the European
Central Bank next year.
"The capital increase is necessary and will be carried out," Giarda
said in the course of the meeting on Saturday. He did not say when
the capital hike would happen, though shareholders approved a
three-month extension to the deadline by which it must be carried
out, to July 31.
The appointment of a new supervisory board, which in turn is
expected to nominate a new management board by the end of January,
should ease the approval of a new business plan.
Support from labor unions helped Giarda win the chairmanship over
rival Piero Lonardi, 69, who had said the unions had too much
influence over the bank's management.
Giarda, like the unions, has said he wants to preserve the
cooperative model of the bank.
A clash between the supervisory and the management board of the
cooperative lender erupted in October, followed by the resignation
of the bank's chief executive Piero Montani and the delay of a
rights issue worth 500 million euros ($683.5 million), initially due
by the end of April 2014.
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Popolare di Milano's top shareholder Andrea Bonomi, who has
supported the reform of the bank, will leave his position at the top
of the management board after failing in an attempt to turn the bank
into a joint-stock company.
The Bank of Italy has asked Popolare Milano and other Italian
cooperative banks to change their governance to increase control
over their top managers and give more say to institutional
investors.
(Additional reporting and writing by
Francesca Landini; editing by Steve Scherer and David Holmes)
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