Davide Boiardi, Founder of AssetMax, spent the day at Debtwire Forum Italy 2026 at Palazzo Parigi, Milan (15 September) — the senior gathering of Italy’s restructuring, distressed debt and private credit market. This is not a conference brochure. It is what the room is actually working through, read through the question that matters to an investment committee: can this position be underwritten?
1. The state-backed creditor nobody has met yet
The most consequential point of the day did not come from the macro slide. It came from Leonardo Adessi of Nextalia: SACE now holds around €3bn of recourse claims against Italian companies in difficulty, arising from the Garanzia Italia guarantees issued during the pandemic — and every one ranks as super-senior. A creditor that used to sit at the bottom of the table has become a state-backed super-priority at the top of it.
His read is that the 2020–23 shock has not reached the restructuring tables yet, and that when it does it will push resolutions away from consensual bilateral deals towards court-supervised tools. Giulia Battaglia of Chiomenti made the practical point that follows: a private equity sponsor facing credit funds speaks the same language and hands over the keys with modest edits, but a family facing funds can produce what she called nuclear conflict over control — even though families fund for the long term without needing an IRR in three to five years.
The signal: Map SACE and Mediocredito Centrale exposure in any Italian target before pricing the equity. A super-senior state creditor changes recovery waterfalls and the practical route to a consensual deal.
The macro backdrop sharpens the point. UniCredit’s Loredana Maria Federico opened with a revised-up 0.8% growth forecast for Italy, oil above $105 and gas above €80/MWh — energy levels last seen in late 2022. Her sentence for anyone underwriting Italian credit: with domestic demand modest, companies cannot pass higher energy costs downstream, so the shock lands in operating margins, not prices.
2. The reform that works — and the bureaucracy creeping back in
The negotiated composition procedure (composizione negoziata della crisi, or CNC) was the day’s other spine. Ermanno La Marca of Bussoletti Nuzzo — thirty years in company and insolvency law — called it the best legacy of the COVID years: a tool that restores flexibility when a company’s counterparties have hardened. His phrase: “a negotiation, but an augmented one.”
Martina Paiardini of Giovanardi Studio Legale set out what practice has done with it: conceived as preventive, CNC has become preparatory — a gateway many companies now enter in declared insolvency and leave through a transaction or a formal instrument. Her summary is worth keeping: CNC does not protect rights, it balances interests.
Then came the critique. La Marca’s target was the new ministerial decree that turns the expert’s checklist into a traceable plan-building methodology — and the 12-month preclusion that stops a company re-entering CNC for a year even when the previous procedure succeeded. Federico Diomeda added the structural constraint: prudential supervision makes Italian banks unable to stay at the table once a client is classified unlikely to pay, so in a bank-centric economy with ten lenders each holding 10%, no lender knows the business well enough to back it.
3. Private credit: the deal is done before the crisis starts
Italian private debt went from €2bn in 2021 to €7bn in 2025. Vanni Mario Zanchi of Arcmont set the scale: private lenders now fund roughly 70% of European mid-market transactions (95% in the Netherlands), while Italy sits at 35–45%. Barbara Ellero of Anthilia put it plainly — banks have not left credit, they have left the segment that matters in a restructuring. A bank cannot write the emergency new money a recovery plan needs; a fund can.
But the panel’s most repeated point was about timing, not aggression. Zanchi’s phrase: the deal is done at the start. Reporting cadence, covenants and governance rights have to be negotiated when the loan is written, because “after eighteen months of a bad year you discover you negotiated semi-annual governance and have no control.”
Francesco De Gennaro of Hogan Lovells Cadwalader offered the most practical innovation of the morning: a CNC management protocol — a written agreement between debtor and creditors, before protective measures are supported, fixing who runs the procedure, who the Chief Restructuring Officer is, and what the plan’s object is. Unioncamere data shows the CNCs that succeed are the long ones, over 300 days. Time is not the enemy. Drift is.
Where the real stress sits
The sectoral panel dismantled the standard pie chart. Giuseppe Palermo of PwC rebased the breakdown to the last eighteen months and the automotive and fashion-retail wedges grew sharply. His numbers were the sharpest of the day: between 2000 and 2025 the world added 40 million vehicles of annual production while Europe fell 21% and Italy 74% — from 1.7 million units to around 500,000. In fashion, his teams regularly find ten-year-old stock still carried at historical cost, “telling a completely different story from the one the consumer sees.”
The warning that closed the day: SACE- and MCC-guaranteed bullet loans come due in 2027–28 and can no longer be extended — “dust under the carpet,” in Palermo’s phrase — alongside tax arrears and a rising cost of money.
What this means for AssetMax clients
Read together, the day described an Italian restructuring market where the information layer now decides the outcome: which guarantees sit at the top of the waterfall, where sector stress actually concentrates, and whether the governance you hold in a downturn is the governance you wrote on day one. That is the work AssetMax exists for — reducing execution risk before ownership transfers, validating complexity during diligence, and turning execution into measurable outcomes.
If a theme from Debtwire applies to a position you are already underwriting, Davide is continuing the conversation. Twenty minutes, no qualification process, and a shared read on where sharper evidence changes the answer.
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Davide Boiardi is Founder of AssetMax, working across pre-deal intelligence, technology and operational due diligence, value creation tracking and exit readiness.