Italian Sea Group owners win back the right to cancel and be repaid
The line the court took out
On 30 July the Fifth Civil Section of the Court of Florence partially revoked the precautionary measures it had granted The Italian Sea Group on 6 July. Those measures, issued provisionally under Article 44 of Italy's code on business crisis and insolvency, did three things at once. They barred owners from using the self-help remedies written into their build contracts. They stopped owners enforcing the guarantees and sureties securing their orders. And they forbade the institutions that had issued those guarantees from paying out on them.
All three are now gone. An owner whose contract gives him a right of termination for yard default may exercise it. An owner holding a refund guarantee may present it, and the bank that wrote it is free to honour it. Everything else stands: the protective measures confirmed on 6 July, running from 1 July for the four months the law allows, remain fully in force, and the company said after the ruling that they are unaffected. What the court withdrew was aimed at one class of counterparty only, and that class is the client.
Read the reasoning, not the result
The court did not release the owners because it took their side. It lifted the freeze because the freeze had stopped serving the plan it was granted to protect. The group's restructuring proposal no longer contemplates finishing everything on the order book. The revised version completes only those orders judged economically sustainable, the ones expected to generate value on delivery. Once a yard no longer intends to build a hull, the court found no reason to keep the owner of that hull from acting on his contract.
For an owner mid-build that reasoning is the actual news, because it is a signal about which side of the line his own contract sits on. An order the yard still means to deliver sits inside a plan and inside the remaining protection. An order written out of the plan does not, and the withdrawal of the shield reads as the notification. No list has been published. An owner who wants to know where he stands will have to ask, and ask in writing.
What the court put in its place
The yard was not left open on every front. In the same ruling the court set up a narrower measure covering strategic suppliers, meaning the firms working on the orders The Italian Sea Group still intends to deliver. Those suppliers can now be paid directly by the company rather than through the assignment of their receivables to factoring companies, and that arrangement holds until the group reaches agreement with the factors.
The choice of who to shelter is revealing. Factoring is where the largest overdue position sits: of the EUR 266.8m the group has reported as past due, EUR 99m was owed to factoring companies. The court has protected the flow of parts and labour towards the hulls that will be finished, and returned the owners of everything else to their contracts. That is a triage, conducted in public and in front of the clients.
The dates that follow
The plan itself is the next milestone. The group is expected to put it in front of the Tuscan regional authorities before the middle of August, and it said after the ruling that it will proceed on the agreed guidelines without modification. Separately it has flagged a possible capital increase of about EUR 100m, no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2026, conditional on binding agreements with suppliers, owners and lenders, and on market conditions at the time.
The sale process runs alongside. On 27 July Sanlorenzo put its name behind Polo Nautico Carrara, the consortium bidding for the whole business on terms that take the yards and the brands and leave the debt where it lies. That bid always envisaged renegotiating live orders one owner at a time. The 30 July ruling changes the balance in that negotiation, because an owner who can credibly terminate and call his guarantee sits differently across the table from one who cannot.
The document to read this week
Holding the right to terminate is not the same as being right to use it. Calling a refund guarantee ends the build, returns the deposit if the instrument is sound and the issuer pays, and puts the owner back at the start of a queue for a slot at a yard that is not in crisis. At this size those slots are running years out. Staying in means negotiating price and delivery with whoever ends up owning the yard.
The variable that decides it is the guarantee itself. An owner should be reading the instrument behind his deposit now: who issued it, whether it is an on-demand refund guarantee or a surety hedged with conditions, what triggers payment, and when it expires. The Court of Florence has just made that piece of paper enforceable again. What it is worth depends on wording agreed years before any of this began.