Right before agreeing to be taken over by the London Stock Exchange, Borsa Italiana exercised an option on MTS, the pan-European government bond platform that dominates the European secondary market and that designed Euronext's market-driven indexes. The Italians had shared ownership of MTS with NYSE-Euronext, but now it's all theirs – and soon part of LSE.
Sounds like a coup for LSE, but the man who built MTS, Gianluca Garbi, has been tossed from the company after a well-publicized pissing match with Borsa Italiana boss Massimo Capuano.
Garbi has landed comfortably in the government bond department of Dresdner Bank – but what does this mean for the new London-Milan project?
(from Steve Zwick in Germany)