(Bloomberg) -- Fabrizio Saccomanni, the chairman of UniCredit SpA and a former senior Bank of Italy official, has died. He was 76.
Saccomanni died suddenly on Thursday, UniCredit said in a statement, without giving additional details.
“The passing of Fabrizio Saccomanni is a loss for the the entire country,” Chief Executive Officer Jean Pierre Mustier said in the statement. Vice Chairman Cesare Bisoni is assuming the chairman's role on an interim basis.
The banker collapsed while vacationing on the island of Sardinia, and a medical rescue team tried to revive him after cardiac arrest, Italian news agency Ansa reported.
Saccomanni attended the bank's press conference on Aug. 7 following the release of second-quarter earnings and joined executives in explaining the bank's results and strategy.
Saccomanni was appointed chairman of Italy's biggest bank in April 2018 when Mustier, a Frenchman recruited in 2016 to revamp the lender, decided to reshuffle the top management as part of his turnaround project.
The manager spent most of his career at the Bank of Italy, the country's central bank.
Saccomanni joined the Bank of Italy in 1967, rising to become head of the foreign department and a manager for international affairs. He was named director general in 2006 after stints at the International Monetary Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
An expert on financial stability, Saccomanni supported European legislation setting out procedures for saving or shuttering failing lenders while serving as finance minister under then-premier Enrico Letta in 2013.
A native of Rome, he studied at Milan's Bocconi University and did post-graduate studies in monetary an international economics at Princeton University.
To contact the reporters on this story: Sonia Sirletti in Milan at ssirletti@bloomberg.net;Daniele Lepido in Milan at dlepido1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Dale Crofts at dcrofts@bloomberg.net, Dan Liefgreen, Ross Larsen
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