Monte dei Paschi, Venerable Italian Bank, Yields to Change

While the move was considered essential to the survival of the bank, Italy’s third-largest, it was seen as tragic by local residents, who lined up at the shareholder meeting to hurl invective at bank management.

“You did nothing to relaunch the bank,” Gabriele Corradi, a former Monte dei Paschi employee and candidate for the mayoral race in 2011, said to the three top managers of the bank sitting in front of him. The new management team arrived last year, brought in to salvage the operation.

“The bank is still doing badly,” Mr. Corradi said. “It’s still losing money.”

Nonetheless, shareholders on Thursday passed changes in bank bylaws to weaken dominance by the Monte dei Paschi Foundation, a charitable organization. The foundation owns one-third of the shares and for decades lavished bank profits on the community of Siena — until there were no more profits.

Financially devastated and with little choice, the foundation supported Thursday’s change. Previously, no shareholders other than the foundation could exercise votes equal to more than 4 percent of the total. Other changes approved at the meeting will allow more frequent turnover on the board, which had been dominated by the foundation and Sienese political interests.

The problems of Monte dei Paschi, which led to a 4.1 billion euro ($5.4 billion) government bailout late last year, have contributed to a nationwide debate about the powerful and secretive foundations that play a large role in the Italian banking system.

In the 1990s, many Italian banks were privatized and converted to stock corporations, but with local foundations receiving large, sometimes controlling stakes. For Monte dei Paschi, the change was mostly formal because it had always belonged to the city in one way or another.

In recent times, no major decision was taken without the approval of the foundation, which supported the ill-advised acquisition of a rival that stretched bank finances and led to its downfall.

Despite the bank’s overwhelming problems, many citizens of Siena refuse to accept that the bank can no longer serve as all-purpose community benefactor and patron, one that has subsidized the local university and a hospital.

“The abolition of the 4 percent limit simply cancels the Sienese identity of the bank,” Paolo Emilio Falaschi, a lawyer in Siena who in the past has also represented the bank, said at the shareholder meeting, which was held in a local auditorium owned by the bank. “It’s incredible.”

Monte dei Paschi plans to sell 1 billion euros of new shares next year to replenish its capital after a loss of 3.2 billion euros last year. That move will inevitably water down the foundation’s stake in the bank, and perhaps allow another institution or a private equity fund to become the largest shareholder.

Alessandro Profumo, who became chairman of Monte dei Paschi last year in the effort to salvage the bank, said at a news conference that he hoped the change in bank governance would make it easier to sell the new shares. The bank also needs cash to repay the 4.1 billion euro bailout loan, known as a Monti bond for former Prime Minister Mario Monti, who was still in office when the bailout was granted.

“The fact that M.P.S. has a chance to restore itself totally and reimburse the Monti bonds is good news for the country,” Mr. Profumo told reporters after the five-hour shareholder meeting.

There had been little doubt about the outcome of the shareholder vote. Still, dozens of Sienese citizens, wearing linen shirts or short sleeves in the heat, used the event to vent their anger at previous managers, who accumulated huge debts; at the Monte dei Paschi Foundation, for giving up all its power; and at current managers, whom they said they doubted would be able to reverse the bank’s fortunes.

Gaia Pianigiani reported from Siena, Italy, and Jack Ewing from Frankfurt.

Twitter Yields to Pressure in Hate Case in France

The case shows how challenging it is for Silicon Valley companies to champion the free speech rights of users while complying with the laws of countries where they do business. It also highlights Silicon Valley’s Europe problem: the Continent represents a large and lucrative market, but its lawmakers, regulators and courts have hounded the industry in recent months on issues as varied as privacy and antitrust law.

For months, Twitter had fought a court order obtained by a private French citizens’ group demanding that the company turn over the user information. But on Friday, the company said it had handed over the information to a prosecutor in Paris, in response to a law enforcement request. By turning over the information, Twitter said, it had ended a lawsuit related to the court order brought by the private group.

In a statement Friday, the company said: “in response to a valid legal request, Twitter has provided the prosecutor of Paris, Presse et Libertés Publiques section of the Paris Tribunal de Grande Instance, with data that may enable the identification of certain users that the Vice-Prosecutor believes have violated French law.”

The statement took pains to note that Twitter was providing the information to law enforcement through a legal request, not to the private group.

The case has important implications for Twitter users worldwide, as governments increasingly try to extract user information from the service. Legal experts say Twitter could have insisted that the French authorities seek to extract the user data by filing a claim in the United States, where the company is based.

Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said that while Twitter had demonstrated its commitment to protecting free speech on many occasions, it was under pressure to meet nations’ demands for information on their citizens, both in America and abroad. Many companies face this pressure, and Twitter is all the more vulnerable now that it has an office in Paris, making its employees and assets there subject to French law.

“Governments have an unquenchable thirst for more information about their citizens, and Internet companies, as repositories of data, are going to be on the list of targets,” Mr. Goldman said. He added: “We are in no position to criticize another government for demanding data on users. Our government is doing that about us every day.”

The French Union of Jewish Students and SOS Racisme had sought the identities of the users, who had used pseudonyms, and in January a French court ordered Twitter to hand over the data. Twitter appealed, and lost, in June. The French student union filed a $50 million civil suit against the company, saying that it had failed to comply with the court order. On Friday, Jonathan Hayoun, president of the group, said that “Twitter has finally accepted its responsibility for hate prevention as a prominent player on the Web.”

In the second half of 2012, Twitter received over 1,000 requests from government agencies in the United States and abroad, from Australia to Turkey. It complied to varying degrees: 69 percent of the time with respect to requests from American authorities, 33 percent from the Dutch, and never in the case of countries like India, Israel or Turkey. Twitter on Friday said it did not have a uniform policy on how it treated law enforcement requests. “Requests for Twitter user information, whether domestic or international, are evaluated on a case-by-case basis,” the company said in a statement.

“There was more fighting Twitter could have done and chose not to,” said Christopher Wolf, a partner at Hogan Lovells who represents American technology companies, including in Europe. He added: “It is an episode that gives me some pause over the potential breadth of jurisdiction by a European government over a U.S. Internet company.”

Twitter’s legal feuds with foreign governments could muddle its expansion overseas. Running afoul of the law in any country potentially makes it vulnerable to having its assets seized and its employees arrested.

Complicating matters, Twitter, like other similar companies, has a sort of jurisprudence of its own, laid out in its Terms of Service. It does not explicitly address hate speech, but stipulates that “users are allowed to post content, including potentially inflammatory content, provided they do not violate the Twitter Terms of Service and Rules.” Those include a prohibition against “direct, specific threats of violence against others.”

The French case was prompted by a spate of anti-Semitic posts late last year. There were also jokes about the Holocaust and comments denigrating Muslims. Holocaust denial is a crime in France, and the country has strict laws against hate speech. Twitter removed the posts in France after the complaints.