Tirrenia, accounts in red & white knight

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".