The knight is white. The accounts are deep in the red. The document is "strictly confidential". Reserved for a few employees, all lovers of playing the stock market and the boundless thrill of the force nine sea. If there was a title, in this new high-class saga, between finances and debts, there would be no doubt: here we go again. The background is always the same, the sea of Sardinia, blessing and delight, business and monopolies, speculation and denied rights. The operation is covered by investigative secrecy, the one imposed by the financial canons of the surprise. Little time to reflect, not even a jolt to understand what is happening.
One-two, close together
For those who have invested hundreds of millions of euros in the high-risk undertaking of the owner of Mascalzone Latino, aka Vincenzo Onorato, owner of Moby and Tirrenia, now Cin, it could be the fateful one-two, two direct punches, one after the other, at close range, the second of which delivered with lethal emphasis. After all, only in Italy can one go, in less than six months, from the threshold of bankruptcy to a miraculous rescue, from a new full-blown financial disaster to a new danger of bankruptcy, also envisaged in the "secret" documents. Everything written down, complete with a final offer to the "creditors": agree to reduce the already harshly reduced debt by another 168 million, otherwise a new insolvency procedure will have to be resorted to with all the possible consequences.
Gambling rules
Onorato knows the rules of the game well. Before making the final offer, balance and write-off, i.e. less money, but immediately, compared to those agreed last June, he blurts out the numbers of the company accounts, this time disclosed well in advance, precisely with the spirit of putting the creditors behind at the wall. Accounts in the red, as if the provisions of the agreement approved by the Court on June 6th had transformed from fairy tales into nightmares in an instant. In short, to the Judges, Onorato's companies declared a financial perspective from the Arabian Nights, only to then, a few months later, declare the collapse of those forecasts. Nothing of what was announced to the Bankruptcy Court and to the creditors themselves occurred, on the contrary.
Fortune tellers in red
The magic word to make it clear whether the patient is well, has a high fever or is already in the process of passing away, is called "Ebtda", or company profit before interest and taxes. It is the thermometer for evaluating cash flows and the health of accounts. A parameter that allows us to verify whether companies are able to make positive profits from ordinary management, profits capable of honoring a mountain of debts, those reduced and certified by the June agreement. It is no coincidence that before the "settlement and write-off" offer, Onorato lays bare those numbers, capable of "softening" his creditors, already bled dry by the reductions of the first agreement. Moby and Cin, to be clearer, in 2022 should have achieved an Ebtda-profit of 94.4 million euros. They miserably stopped at just 3 million, 91 less than expected. In September 2023 the economic accounts had forecast 109 million, they stopped at less than half, just 48. They pass the blame for the collapse of the forecasts on fuel and personnel costs, but it is all too clear that the timing of the accounts in the red and the balance and write-off offer is not very convincing. If those numbers are the premise, the crux of the operation is locked down in a document written as a "draft still subject to non-material additions and modifications by the relevant parties". We report the main excerpt, the one that heralds the "white knight", the man who is trying to wrest from Onorato's hands, with a single blow, two of the shipping companies that have always shared the Sardinian routes, the Tirrenia- Cin and Moby. His name is Gianluigi Aponte, he is Swiss, he holds an enormous wealth, he has long been a candidate to buy Ita, the former Alitalia airline, last October he took home 50% of Italo, the main and private competition of the Ferrovie dello Stato State. His main business is the sea: his company, MSC, owns or manages over 560 container ships, he also owns MSC Crociere and the SNAV company, hydrofoils and ferries to connect the main Italian islands. It is he who, after having acquired 49% of Cin and Moby last June, avoiding the first bankruptcy of Onorato's companies, risks the lethal coup by putting 315 million euros in cash on the table, one on top of the other. Last June, with the green light from the bankruptcy judges, the two companies had already cut their debts from 664 million to 483, with the State having given the owner of Mascalzone Latino a "surreal" discount of 100 million, compared to the 180 that the public coffers should have collected from the non-payment of the purchase of Tirrenia.
Cut or Tribunal
The proposal sent to banks and bondholders, in the name and on behalf of Aponte, is explicit: «Considering the persistence of a higher-than-expected fuel cost and the lower cash flow, Moby and Cin are not able to carry out the para-arrangement without modifications significant. Furthermore, if the two composition procedures are not carried out by 6 December 2023, there will be a real risk of revocation of the two procedures, jeopardizing the Group's business continuity and the returns for creditors". The message is in Onorato style: accept these conditions, or the agreements will fail, forgetting the expected payments, and business continuity itself would be put to the test. Onorato's action plan, the one that turns hundreds of millions of debts into confetti, is told like a fairy tale with a happy ending, complete with a white knight who saves everything and everyone.
Waste money
It's a shame that whoever accepts the offer will have to give up a further 35% of their money, already significantly cut by the agreement. With a timing that seems to have been studied carefully, the offer of the "white knight" appears between the lines of those armored documents: «In November 2023 SAS (Aponte's safe) communicated to Moby its willingness to make available, through shareholder loan, the amount of euro 315.7 million to allow the Companies to proceed with the immediate reimbursement of the overall exposure, with full and definitive settlement and without executing all the Transaction Documents, in order to execute the Proposals and obtain the dismissal decree from the Court by 6 December 2023". A formula, that of the "loan", which would aim to circumvent the risk of market concentration. A hope that is not without pitfalls. We will now need to understand who will accept this umpteenth "cut" and whether the Competition and Market Authority will accept yet another monopoly on the seas of Sardinia, this time on "loan".
