Paresa remains Italian: the three historic managers take over the entire capital

A leading company in Italy, a family-owned business undergoing the test of generational transition, three managers who have been friends for thirty years and who decide to take it over so as not to lose its identity and know-how. This is the perimeter of the management buyout operation announced yesterday for Paresa, a historic Cesena-based company specialising in hydrocarbon storage plants and pressure tanks. Executives Raffaele Cedioli (general manager), Enrico Sozzi (commercial director) and Dante Ravaioli (financial director) - all engineers born in 1966, fellow students at the University of Bologna and lifelong friends - acquired 100% of the capital with equal stakes from Alberto Palladino and his children Marco and Lorenza, who have left the shareholding and management altogether.

Founded in 1978 by Palladino together with Reali and Sabbatini, Paresa - an acronym for the three original partners, but for the past 20 years Palladino has been alone at the helm - has grown step by step, from a maintenance company to a tank factory, and has become an international partner of all the best-known names in oil & gas. "We have always experienced this company as our home, feeling part of the team and the entrepreneurial vision from the very beginning. And when we grasped the president's willingness to pass the hand, we stepped forward,' explains Cedioli, who sits with his two friends on the board of directors from 2019. 'Not out of personal ambition, but out of a sense of responsibility towards an organisation in which we believe and as a natural consequence of a professional life spent here that should not be interrupted.

Today Paresa employs 450 people, about 90 of whom work in the production plant in Mercato Saraceno, in the province of Forlì-Cesena, with a mechanical workshop and sandblasting area, and about 50 in the technical and administrative offices at the headquarters in Cesena. The rest is distributed among the numerous active construction sites in Italy and abroad, particularly in North Africa and the Middle East. In 2024, the company closed with €85 million in production value, €9 million in Ebitda and a net financial position of zero. A leap to 100 million is expected for the current year, thanks to significant foreign orders, "and the order book allows us to look with the same confidence to 2026, an important factor in lightening the weight of the choice made to move from employees to entrepreneurs," the managing director points out.

Paresa specialises in the design and construction to order of large plants for the storage of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons, including steel spheres for compressed liquid gas up to 40 bar. It has realised, among others, the Tempa Rossa plant in Basilicata and is currently engaged in the development of technologies for the storage of hydrogen in liquid form or cryogenic ammonia. "The oil & gas sector is by no means finished, it is just evolving. And we are preparing ourselves, including on special welds and technological standards required by new energy carriers,' Cedioli emphasises.

The MBO operation - financially supported by a pool led by RomagnaBanca and Cassa Centrale Banca - avoids any operational discontinuity and allows the preservation of a corporate asset rooted in the territory: the three managers will retain their respective delegations (operational, commercial and financial), each with an equal share of 33.33%: 'We have complementary roles and a relationship of trust matured over thirty years of working together, and we have always been friends even after we closed the company door,' adds the general manager.