The Targetti family, former owners of the homonymous group specializing in lighting, is offering for sale Villa La Sfacciata, a historic villa on the Florentine hills that owes its name to the shamelessly beautiful position, which dominates the panoramas of Scandicci, San Casciano and Impruneta.
The villa, built between 1300 and 1400, was owned by the Vespucci family and then passed to the Antinori family in the seventeenth century. Since the end of the 90s it has been owned by the Targetti family directly to 70% and indirectly, through Tre Holding srl, for the remaining 30%. According to BeBeez, the request is 10 million euros.
The prestigious property insists on 14 hectares, with a total covered area of 3,000 square meters; there are fifty extra-luxury rooms, sixty bathrooms, four wonderful thermal pools. The large halls are full of frescoes and works of art. Outside, a lush two-hectare garden surrounds the property, which also boasts a private golf course (here the brochure prepared by the Lionard real estate agency).
Tre Holding (acronym for Targetti real estate) in turn belongs to the Targetti family, through Soci Tp srl and is the holding company that also owns and manages the logistics and production assets concentrated in Campi Bisenzio (Florence), spun off in 2014 by Targetti Sankey and currently leased to a luxury fashion maison with a six year plus six lease. The bank debt of Tre Holding, amounting to 130 million euros gross, and the equity partecipation instruments were recently taken over entirely by Illimity Bank, which is now the only bank counterpart of the holding, towards which it boasts a restructured loan lasting almost 5 years, expiring on December 31, 2025 (see here a previous article by BeBeez).
Maurizio Ria, chairman of Tre Holding and managing director of restructuring advisor Duke & Key, was the creator of the deal, which allowed the banking group that supported the Targetti Group in its long crisis to recover much of the receivables. According to BeBeez, Mr. Ria is now engaged in the last phase of the project, that is, the valorization and sale of the Tre Holding real estate assets. On the one hand, therefore, he put Villa La Sfacciata up for sale and on the other hand he started the first discussions to sell the logistics assets. With the proceeds raised from the disposals, Tre Holding will reimburse the debt with Illimity and also pay a small earn-out to the creditor banks that have transferred the receivables to Illimity.
The industrial assets of the Targetti Sankey lighting group had been sold to the 3F Filippi group in December 2017 by the Idea Ccr 1 fund, managed by Dea Capital Alternative Funds sgr (see here a previous article by BeBeez). The fund had taken over Targetti as part of a company restructuring operation with the aim of accelerating the path of international development. The company was headed by the Targetti family, through the Soci Tp srl (see here a previous article by BeBeez). The sale of Targetti Sankey allowed the repayment of the loans to the company contributed by the banks.
In more detail, in June 2016 the Idea Credit Recovery fund and the main financing banks (CR Firenze, Mps, Unicredit, Bnl) had signed an agreement relating to the purchase of receivables from the group specializing in lighting (equal to 39% of the total value of the banking system’s receivables from Targetti) and the participatory financial instruments in their possession (see here a previous article by BeBeez) and subsequently the other lending banks decided to follow the same path. The transfer of 100% of Targetti’s capital to the fund then occurred in March 2017.
After a debt restructuring agreement signed in 2010 with banks on the basis of art. 67 of the Bankruptcy Law, Targetti Sankey had in fact then signed a first restructuring agreement with the banks in 2012 on the basis of article 182-bis of the Bankruptcy Law and then a second agreement pursuant to art. 182-bis in December 2014 (see here a previous article by BeBeez and here the homologation by the Florence Court in November 2014). On that occasion, on the one hand, the net financial debt had been reduced by 110 million to just 5 million euro (against 34 million in revenues, 2.1 million in ebitda and a net loss of 6.4 million ), on the other hand, the company had been recapitalized with 40.2 million euros by precisely converting as many bank credits into equity instruments (in the tables on the page the situation of the credit lines before and after the last debt restructuring).
An integral part of the agreement was also the sale in 2014 by Targetti of 100% of the shares of the subsidiary Louis Poulsen to the Danish private equity fund Polaris for a final price of 700 million Danish crowns as part of Targetti’s debt restructuring plan (see here a previous article by BeBeez). In turn, Targetti, flanked by 3i, had bought Louis Poulsen in 2007 from a group of private equity funds, including Polaris, for 1.25 billion Danish crowns, which were said to have cashed 7x the capital invested (see here Real Deals). Targetti had conducted the operation with a high portion of debt, a choice that had proved fatal following the subsequent financial crisis of 2008, which triggered the spiral of the group’s crisis. Louis Poulsen was then acquired by Investindustrial in 2018 (see here a previous article by BeBeez) and today it is part of the platform of luxury and design Design Holding, set up together with Carlyle (see here a previous article by BeBeez).
