Five bids for The Italian Sea Group: Sri Global and Azimut want the whole lot
Carrara Yacht Club (a subsidiary of Sanlorenzo) and the Baglietto Group are in the running for the La Spezia shipyard alone
The second phase of the tender process to identify potential investors for The Italian Sea Group has now concluded. The company has announced that it has received five binding offers. It added that all the offers received “relate to transactions structured exclusively as asset deals, two of which relate to the business as a whole”.
According to *Il Sole 24 Ore*, the two bids in question are from Sri Global – the investment holding company headed by Giulio Gallazzi (52 per cent) and Bernardo Vacchi (48 per cent), which has submitted a fully funded bid and is proposing Vincenzo Poerio as the new CEO of Tisg – and from Azimut Benetti, which intends to secure the shipyards in Carrara, La Spezia and Viareggio. A third binding bid comes from the Polo Nautico di Carrara consortium (owned in equal parts by Sanlorenzo and Polo Nautico Viareggio, the latter controlled by Sanlorenzo itself), which has submitted a bid for La Spezia only. An offer (the fourth) for this shipyard has also been received from Baglietto.
The latest binding offer may have come from Palumbo Shipyards (which holds a 50-50 joint venture with MSC for the management of the Malta Shipyard) or from Safe Harbour Marinas (a subsidiary of Blackstone).
As regards Sri Global, the bid is structured as a total asset deal and covers the entire scope envisaged for the acquisition of the assets, including all employees, under the court-supervised arrangement. There is no corporate continuity with the current Tisg and, should the bid be successful, Poerio, a leading manager in the superyacht sector, will take on the role of chief executive. Sri Global operates with its own capital and already holds 13 shareholdings – comprising majority and qualified minority stakes – in industrial companies and firms in the banking and financial sector.
As for the Carrara Nautical Centre, which had previously announced that it had its sights set on the entire Tisg asset, yesterday the group explained in a statement that ‘in light of the information and documentation available, and taking into account the timeline of the process, it was deemed appropriate to limit the transaction solely to the La Spezia shipyard business unit, utilising a more streamlined shareholding structure than previously announced. This approach will, in any case, safeguard the supply chain and employment levels at the production site’.
