On 17 August the Court of Florence granted another 120 days of protection from creditors, and most of the English-language coverage read it as a reprieve for The Italian Sea Group as a whole. That is not what the order says. Two different procedures are running around Italy's largest listed superyacht builder, they cover different companies, and the difference decides who is shielded and who is exposed. The assets themselves went on the block on 10 August.
Two procedures, one group
The order extends the protective measures granted to GC Holding S.p.A., founder Giovanni Costantino's family holding, and to Celi S.r.l., the joinery in Terni. Both sit inside a procedure called composizione negoziata della crisi — negotiated crisis settlement, written into Italy's business crisis code in 2021.
Management keeps running the company throughout: this is a negotiation, not a bankruptcy. The court appoints an independent expert — here Dr Enrico Terzani — to chair the talks with banks, suppliers and factors. While those talks run, the court can grant misure protettive: a shield that stops creditors enforcing against the company's assets. The law caps it at 120 days, extendable once, to 240 in total. The measures were confirmed on 20 April and would have expired on 16 July; the new term counts from that expiry, taking the shield to roughly mid-November. There is no third extension.
TISG S.p.A. itself is somewhere else. On 4 July the court opened a concordato preventivo con riserva — a composition with creditors "with reservation", under article 44 of the same code. The company gets protection immediately and files the restructuring plan later, inside a deadline the court sets. It buys time without losing the shield, though the court now supervises the process, which it opened "in the perspective of business continuity": the goal on paper is yards that keep working, not a piecemeal liquidation.
A shield covers the company's own assets. Property that belongs to somebody else sits outside it, and that distinction has already cost the yard two rulings.
What is on the block
The competitive process, run by Meti Corporate Finance and KPMG Advisory, replaces one-by-one talks with a single comparable procedure. It covers four brands — Admiral, Tecnomar, Perini Navi and Picchiotti — plus the yards at Marina di Carrara, La Spezia and Viareggio, the stakes in Celi and in TISG Turkey Yat Tersanecilik, and the order book. Bidders can come in two ways: an asset deal for individual pieces, or a share deal through a capital increase that keeps the company running.
| Stage | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Non-binding indicative offers | 15 September 2026, 12.00 CEST |
| Binding offers | 15 October 2026 |
| Target signing, subject to court authorisation | 26 October 2026 |
The La Spezia yard has its own arithmetic. TISG bought it out of Perini Navi's insolvency auction in January 2022 for €80 million; BeBeez reports it is now discussed at €20–30 million. Four years, a quarter of the price.
The numbers behind the sale
| Metric | 2025 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | €295.1M (−27%) | €404.4M |
| Net result | Loss of €170.9M | Profit of about €34M |
| Net financial position | −€129.6M | −€12.5M |
| Shareholders' equity | Wiped out | — |
The order book still reads €1.03 billion gross, but net of revenue already recognised it comes down to €349.5 million, against €1.24 billion quoted in April 2025. FIOM-CGIL says the company separately confirmed total indebtedness above €400 million — a different metric from the net financial position, and the two do not add up. The rescue plan asks shareholders for up to €290 million in new capital and participating instruments.
The share tells the same story faster. TISG has traded between €6.80 and €1.28 over the past year, losing 36.7 percent in a single session on 16 March. Then the bidding process was announced and the market read insolvency as good news: up 30.35 percent over five sessions to 12 August, closing at €1.40, the best performer in the FTSE Italia Small Cap.
Around 500 people work for the group directly, down about 60 since February, with roughly 200 on cassa integrazione, the state-backed short-time work scheme. Another 1,500 or so work in the supply chain, their position unresolved.
The 17 August order is the second and last extension available. Italian law allows 120 days of protective measures, extendable once, to a maximum of 240. Whatever the bidding process produces has to land inside that window.
Who wants what
Sanlorenzo is going for everything, and not alone. Polo Nautico Carrara is a company built for this deal: 45 percent Sanlorenzo, 45 percent Polo Nautico Viareggio holding the stake for future industrial partners, and 10 percent spread across some 30 firms from the yard's own supply chain. Polo Nautico Carrara's Riccardo Cima filed an irrevocable offer with a deposit on 5 August for the whole industrial complex — Marina di Carrara, La Spezia, the Celi joinery — free of liens and debt. Sanlorenzo will take a minority stake and has issued a letter of patronage backing the bid for up to 10 percent of the offer price. Executive chairman Massimo Perotti framed it as an obligation: a market leader, he said, is measured by its responsibility for jobs and industrial continuity as much as by the value it creates. The offer commits to keeping the entire workforce, which is what buying the complex whole is for.
Baglietto wants one thing. Chief executive Diego Michele Deprati has confirmed interest in the La Spezia assets and nothing else, saying the group is watching developments and will assess them in good time. The logic is geography: Baglietto already builds metres from the TISG site.
Two more names circulate in the Italian press, with nothing official behind either. Azimut|Benetti is reported to be looking at La Spezia, and Ferretti to have started reading the file with the same site in focus. Blue Economy counts five unnamed exploratory approaches to the site.
The owners caught in the middle
For anyone with a hull in build at Carrara, the question that matters is whether the procedure locks their boat inside the yard. The court has answered it twice, both times against the shipyard.
On 16 June, ruling on appeals from five owners, the Court of Florence partially lifted the protective measures. Vessels previously belonging to the claimants, it held, could not be pulled inside the shield: they are neither assets of the entrepreneur nor assets instrumental to the business. Those five walked out with the right to terminate and to exercise their other contractual remedies.
The background is money. TISG had been going back to clients with demands for top-up payments — reportedly as much as 40 percent above contract price — to cover the overruns that started the crisis in February. The five who won got the right to refuse, or to walk.
On 31 July the insolvency section refused the yard's request to suspend its live construction contracts. TISG had asked for a pause to finish checking the margin on individual orders; the court said no across the board, excepting only hulls 606 and 614, already at handover. Seventeen owners sit in that perimeter, most of them opposed to the suspension, and the court treated live contracts as consistent with the rescue plan. Owners keep their remedies, termination included.
What none of it guarantees is a delivery date. If the yard changes hands, live contracts move inside the perimeter of the deal, and the conversation about top-up payments starts again with a new owner across the table.
What happens next
The first real signal arrives on 15 September, when indicative offers are counted and the field stops being speculation. Three things shape it: whether anyone besides Polo Nautico Carrara bids for the whole complex, since a single buyer is the only version that keeps the group intact; whether the La Spezia interest turns into paper, because a yard sold separately breaks Sanlorenzo's all-in logic; and whether the audit of the 2025 accounts comes back clean, since the irrevocable offer depends on it.
Behind all of it runs the clock. Protection for GC Holding and Celi expires around mid-November with nothing further available, and TISG's own composition still needs a plan and a creditors' vote. The competitive process was built to finish before the shield does — by about three weeks.
Photo: The Italian Sea Group / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
