Italian Sea Group's Debt Hits EUR 270m as Its Auditor Quits

How much does the Italian Sea Group owe now?

The Italian Sea Group's overdue liabilities stood at EUR 270 million on 31 July 2026, up from EUR 257.7 million a month earlier, even as the company moved deeper into formal court protection.

Marine Industry News, citing the company's own July filing, put the breakdown at EUR 98.4 million owed to factoring companies, EUR 85.7 million to suppliers, EUR 48.7 million to banks and other lenders, EUR 17.6 million in unpaid tax and EUR 19.6 million in social security contributions. Shareholder equity was negative EUR 392.3 million at the end of June, and the net financial position was negative EUR 179.6 million. Full-year 2025 revenue fell to EUR 295.1 million from EUR 404.4 million in 2024, with a negative EBITDA of EUR 99.2 million and a net loss of EUR 170.9 million.

The company's auditor, BDO Audit Services, resigned on 27 July, citing missing documentation it needed to sign off the accounts. An auditor walking away mid-crisis is a harder signal than the debt figure itself: it means the numbers the court, the bidders and the roughly 500 staff on reduced hours are working from have not been independently checked since the crisis deepened. Part of that hole traces to the August 2024 sinking of Bayesian, a Perini Navi 56-metre lost off Sicily: the group has filed a USD 456 million damages claim against the yacht's owner and others over the commercial fallout, and the dispute has weighed on the Perini Navi brand through the whole of this crisis, even though Bayesian's loss is a separate matter from the cost overruns that triggered it.

What changed in the legal process this month?

On 30 June the Italian Sea Group moved from the voluntary composizione negoziata talks it had been running since March into a formal court-supervised restructuring under Article 44 of Italy's Crisis and Insolvency Code, after negotiations with its own shipowner clients broke down.

The shift matters because a voluntary process depends on creditors staying at the table; a court-supervised one gives the Florence court, not the company, control of the timeline and the protective measures that keep creditors from seizing assets or cancelling contracts outright. The company first entered composizione negoziata in March, when its protective measures took provisional effect, and the Florence court confirmed those measures for four months in April. Law360 Bankruptcy Authority and Italian outlets Borsa Italiana and Shipping Italy each confirmed the same later sequence: the court had already partially revoked those protective measures in late July, a sign it was losing patience with the pace of the rescue, before granting the company 60 days to file a full restructuring plan under the tougher Article 44 process.

Two dates now sit on the calendar. The Florence court will hear that restructuring plan on 16 September, and shareholders are due to vote on a EUR 140 million capital increase, plus up to EUR 150 million in participating financial instruments that could convert creditor claims into equity, on 30 September. Both fall inside the same fortnight as the Monaco Yacht Show, where several of the yards the group is trying to sell would normally be exhibiting.

Who is bidding to take over the Italian Sea Group?

The lead bid is a consortium called Polo Nautico Carrara, backed by rival builder Sanlorenzo, which wants the group's yards as a whole rather than piecemeal.

That consortium has been the front-runner since Sanlorenzo confirmed its interest on 11 August, and it now competes with a narrower bid from Baglietto, which wants only the La Spezia yard, the former Perini Navi hull-building site TISG absorbed in 2021, confirmed on 25 August. SuperyachtNews and Italian financial press have also named Giulio Gallazzi's SRI Global and Bernardo Vacchi's Finvacchi as possible independent bidders, while Azimut|Benetti and Ferretti Group, the two largest Italian groups by output, have each said in the same weeks that they want no part of the deal.

The split matters to a bidder's own customers as much as to the group's: a whole-company buyer like the Sanlorenzo-backed consortium would likely keep every brand's build slots and warranty obligations under one roof, while a yard-by-yard sale could leave an Admiral or Tecnomar order tied to a shipyard with a different new owner than the brand that sold it.

What does this mean if I have a yacht in build, refit or already delivered at one of these yards?

An owner with a yacht under construction at Admiral, Perini Navi, Tecnomar or Picchiotti now has two new fixed dates to track rather than an open-ended crisis, and a court process that has already forced the company back to the table with its own shipowner clients once this year.

A forensic audit commissioned during the crisis found roughly USD 70 million in unexplained cost overruns across several superyacht orders, and it was the collapse of talks to renegotiate those specific contracts with shipowners in July that pushed the company into formal court protection in the first place. In February the group's own owners had already won the right, via an earlier court ruling reported in this desk's 2 August story, to cancel contracts and be repaid rather than wait out the crisis - a remedy that remains open to anyone whose build contract is affected by the September court dates.

For an owner of a yacht already delivered from any of the group's brands, the practical risk is narrower: warranty claims routed through a insolvent parent company move slower and depend on which entity survives the restructuring, and resale buyers are already pricing that uncertainty in, which is part of why a delivered Perini Navi like Norfolk Star sold this August at EUR 4.45 million after eight years on the market. Nothing in the September filings changes the yacht itself; it changes who answers the phone if something under warranty needs fixing.

What exactly is Italian Sea Group selling, and on what timeline?

The sale covers far more than the two publicly named bids suggest: every yard the group operates in Italy and Turkey, its furniture-making arm, and its stake in a separate furniture company are all on the table, and the company has set its own offer deadlines ahead of the court's.

The process is wider than the Baglietto and Sanlorenzo-backed bids alone suggest. Per Megayacht News, the assets on offer include the Carrara and La Spezia yards, the Viareggio furniture-making site, five further shipyards the group operates in Turkey, and the company's shareholder stake in furniture maker Celi 1920, on top of the four yacht brands themselves. A bidder can structure an asset deal around any single unit, any combination, or the whole group, and joint bids from more than one buyer are allowed. The alternative is a share deal, which would require recapitalising the listed parent company directly rather than carving out pieces of it.

The company has set its own clock on top of the court's: non-binding offers are due by 15 September, irrevocable offers by 15 October, matching the Baglietto yard-only deadline already reported, with signing targeted for 26 October. For an owner with a build slot at any of the four brands, that sequencing matters more than the debt figure itself, because which structure wins, one operator or several, decides whether their contract and warranty end up under a single roof or split across new owners.