Ferretti’s annual general meeting in Milan concluded in dramatic fashion today with the Weichai slate of directors taking 52 per cent of votes against 47 per cent for the list put forward by Czech billionaire Karel Komárek’s KKCG Maritime, a result that installs Tan Ning as chairman of a nine-strong board and brings Alberto Galassi’s twelve-year tenure as chief executive to a close.

The new board will convene on an urgent basis tomorrow morning to install Stassi Anastassov as his successor, but the process has been fraught, marred by allegations of regulatory non-compliance and undisclosed shareholder coordination that have yet to be addressed by the authorities. A source close to KKCG tells SuperyachtNews this will be a lengthy process, but one Komárek’s side is quite confident will result in their favour in the end.

That result was settled in a matter of hours by a margin of just under five points and sits at the end of a four-day sequence that has dragged the contest for control out of the boardroom and into the offices of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Consob and the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission.

The KKCG source tells SuperyachtNews that the split between the two slates was, in their reading, a contest between concentrated related-party voting on one side and a dispersed institutional float on the other. “Six or seven shareholders, all Chinese or Weichai-linked, voted on one side. More than 40 institutional shareholders, funds and private investors voted on the other. The market voted for us.”

Weichai’s 39.5 per cent, taken together with around 6.6 per cent of recent acquisitions by four Chinese or Weichai-linked entities, accounts for almost the entirety of the 52.3 per cent that delivered the new board. Those four entities are Bank of China at around 2 per cent, the Swiss-domiciled AdTech Advanced Technologies at 2.8 per cent (founded by a former Weichai Power adviser), Wealt Strategy Holding at around 1 per cent and Yanjan International at 0.8 per cent. Each acquisition was sized below the 3 per cent threshold that triggers Consob notification. KKCG’s lawyers told the meeting that the pattern is consistent with concerted action.

The source also tells SuperyachtNews that KKCG’s position now is one of waiting rather than of immediate legal escalation. “We are waiting for the Italian government and the market authority. These procedures take time.”

Then there is the matter of the two directors resigning with immediate effect on the morning of the vote. Piero Ferrari, the honorary president and Stefano Domenicali, chief executive of Formula One, gave up their board seats and their committee positions without severance and without holding any Ferretti shares, both having broken from the board majority in March to back KKCG’s tender offer and both having been retained on Komárek’s slate for today’s vote.

Between them, they vacated six committee positions, including Domenicali’s chairmanship of Remuneration and Ferrari’s seat on the Strategic Committee that oversees product direction across Ferretti Yachts, Riva, Pershing, Itama, CRN, Custom Line and Wally.

Ferrari’s open letter is, frankly, cuttingly transparent with how the long-time exec felt about alleged tactics undertaken by certain parties, citing “frustration and disappointment for what I have witnessed in past weeks”, alleging that “various entities close to a faction seem to have adopted a strategy aimed at impeding such substantive discussion and vote.” He noted that recent acquisitions had “occurred in a manner so to appear below all existing regulatory thresholds” and singled out the spotlight now drawn over Ferretti by the press and regulatory authorities.

Domenicali, less explicit but alluding to the same allegations, wrote that Ferretti’s management “should reflect the highest standards of integrity and transparency” and that what he had witnessed in recent weeks was “in clear contrast with my idea of what Ferretti should be”.

All of this set the scene for what was always going to be an explosive meeting. KKCG’s lawyers walked into the AGM and asked the chair to suspend the voting rights of the company’s largest shareholder, to which the chair declined as there had not been any government intervention. By the time the result had been counted, KKCG had already issued a public statement formally challenging the validity of the outcome.

The procedural challenge lodged inside the meeting sets out the legal architecture that the regulators will now examine. The reasoning behind the Azur lawyers (KKCG’s holding vehicle) request to suspend Weichai’s voting rights across its entire stake, or to adjourn the AGM pending investigation by the competent authorities, was on the basis of two arguments.

The first concerns “Golden Power” where Ferretti is classified as a holder of “assets and relationships of strategic importance” in three resolutions of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and resting on Ferretti Security Division (FSD), the unit established within the group in 2016 to build dual-use vessels for the Italian Navy, the Carabinieri and other institutional customers at home and abroad.

For context, Italy’s Golden Power regime allows the government to screen, condition, or block foreign direct investments in strategic sectors to protect national security, technology, and energy.

FSD accounted for only 0.4 per cent of group revenues in 2025, but Golden Power classification turns on the strategic nature of the activity rather than its commercial weight and on that basis KKCG’s lawyers argued that Weichai, as the non-European controlling shareholder of a strategically classified Italian company, was obliged under the Regulation to notify the Presidency of its holding – an obligation that “has never been fulfilled” and that Weichai “would seem to have knowingly operated in breach” of.

The second argument concerns the share register, and rests on the proposition that the recent acquisitions by Bank of China, AdTech, Wealt Strategy and Yanjan International, taken together with Weichai’s existing holding, constitute “concerted action and/or the existence of undisclosed shareholders’ agreements” between parties that have failed to disclose their coordination to the market.

In Italy, if the recent purchases are found to be coordinated and undisclosed, the vote they delivered today could be ruled invalid. In Hong Kong, where Ferretti maintains its primary listing, parties found to have acted in concert above 30 per cent are required to launch a takeover bid for the rest of the company.

KKCG’s lawyers also flagged a conflict of interest in the majority of Ferretti’s current board, including the chair, who hold managerial roles within the Weichai Group, and invited each of them “to adopt the required decisions solely in the interest of Ferretti and not of the shareholder by whom they are employed”.

In a statement issued after the meeting closed, KKCG raised “concerns regarding the integrity and validity of the voting process” and made clear that it considers the result open to challenge, on the basis that the Weichai notification failure “is directly relevant to the validity of the AGM vote” and that, taken together with the concerted action concerns, the question now is “whether votes cast by Weichai and connected entities were validly exercised or should have been counted”.

The new nine-member board has been seated with eight Weichai-slate directors (Tan Ning as chairman, Stassi Anastassov, Patrick Sun, Zhang Xiaomei, Federica Marchionni, Jin Zhao, Zhu Yi and Donatella Sciuto).

There is one KKCG representative, however, in Katarína Kohlmayer, the group’s chief financial officer, who takes the minority seat under the gender balance rules that require Italian listed-company boards to maintain at least 40 per cent representation of each gender. Komárek himself does not sit on the new board, having been put forward as KKCG’s proposed chairman in a contest his slate did not win. The committee structure, to be confirmed at tomorrow’s urgent board meeting, places Kohlmayer on the Strategic and Sustainability committees but excludes her from Control and Risk, Nomination and Remuneration: the three bodies where KKCG would arguably most want a watching brief.

In his post-vote statement, the new chairman, Tan said that “the new Board of Directors represents continuity, stability and growth and leverages a long-term industrial vision aimed at enhancing the Group and its brands, as well as the production presence in Italy and the global sales network, in line with the path undertaken since 2012.” That year was, of course, the year Weichai acquired Ferretti and saved it from collapse.

The AGM also declared a €0.11 dividend on the 338,482,654 ordinary shares in issue, totalling €37.2 million, payable on 17 June.

The pressure had been building for four days. Komárek wrote directly to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and to ministers Adolfo Urso and Guido Crosetto on Monday, with copies to Consob, setting out KKCG’s Golden Power concerns. MPs from within Meloni’s coalition have publicly questioned the wisdom of allowing Italian naval defence technology to fall under Chinese control. Weichai is yet to comment on the matter.

The AGM has delivered, but it has delivered far more questions than it has answered. Rome, Consob and the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission now hold the question of whether today’s result stands.

Click here to become part of The Superyacht Group community, and join us in our mission to make this industry accessible to all, and prosperous for the long-term. We are offering access to the superyacht industry’s most comprehensive and longstanding archive of business-critical information, as well as a comprehensive, real-time superyacht fleet database, for just £10 per month, because we are One Industry with One Mission. Sign up here.