The protective umbrella that froze every live build contract at The Italian Sea Group (TISG) is no longer airtight. The Court of Florence has partially reversed the protective order it confirmed on 20 April, upholding the appeals of five shipowners. Those five clients are now free to terminate their contracts with the builder — the first contract-side breach in a restructuring that, until now, had kept the whole order book in place.
What the court actually decided
The ruling was reported on 11 June, with the decision reserved after a hearing on 27 May. It does not touch the recapitalisation plan or the wider standstill. What it does is carve five contracts out of the protective regime granted under Articles 18 and 19 of Italy's 2019 Corporate Crisis Code — the framework that lets a viable business keep trading while it rebuilds.
For those five owners, the practical effect is direct: they may now exercise the rights available to them under their build agreements, including termination. The freeze that the April order had placed over every contract no longer reaches them.
The reasoning that matters
The court's logic is the substantive part, and it could echo beyond these five cases. The judges held that the vessels in question are "neither assets of the entrepreneur nor assets considered instrumental to the business," and that the appellants do not hold creditor status under the protective framework.
In other words, a client's yacht in build is not TISG's own property, nor a tool the company needs to keep operating — so the standstill designed to protect TISG's assets and creditors cannot stretch to cover it. The owners sit outside the shield, not under it.
The breach is narrow but precise: protection holds for everyone else, yet the court has drawn a line the next aggrieved owner can point to.
Why it matters now
This is chapter two of a story we covered last month. In short: TISG opened a composizione negoziata — Italy's negotiated crisis-settlement procedure — and in May disclosed a material event under Article 2447 of the Civil Code, after cumulative losses pushed its capital below the legal minimum. Shareholders vote on the rescue at an AGM on 22 July. The full account is in our earlier piece, The Italian Sea Group Calls a Rescue Vote.
The order book is the asset the rescue leans on, and it is exactly the order book this ruling touches. Each freed contract is a potential cancellation or an advance-payment clawback, and it comes in the weeks before shareholders are asked to back a recapitalisation. The timing is awkward: the company wants to show stability into the 22 July vote, and instead a court has just confirmed that clients can leave.
A word of caution on scale. TISG has not named the five owners or their vessels, so the size of those contracts is unknown — five superyacht-range hulls could be a meaningful share of a book valued at €1.24 billion at the end of 2024, or a minor one. The protective umbrella stays in force for every other contract; what has changed is that these five are no longer frozen.
What to watch
Three things follow from here.
- Whether more owners file the same appeal. The reasoning — vessels in build are not the builder's instrumental assets, and clients are not creditors — is general enough to be cited again.
- The 22 July AGM, where the structure and size of the recapitalisation get decided, now with one more variable on the table.
- The KPMG forensic review of the historical accounts, still expected around the end of June, which remains the missing number underneath the whole conversation.
TISG's only public comment so far has been measured: it will "continue to update the market on developments." For owners and brokers, the reading is the one we gave in chapter one, with a single revision. TISG is still being asked to refinance, not to file — but the contracts are no longer untouchable, and the next few weeks will show how many clients decide to test that.
Photo: The Italian Sea Group production hub at Marina di Carrara. Source: The Italian Sea Group S.p.A.
