Blizzard over UCINA, big companies walked out. Now what?

UCINA (the boating industry confederation) is in a blizzard. Tomorrow there will be elections for the new president: “mock” elections, since there is only one candidate, Carla Demaria, president of Monte Carlo Yachts and the Beneteau Group. Lamberto Tacoli, president pro tempore after Massimo Perotti’s resignation and other candidate, withdrew his candidacy after, surprisingly, yesterday ten companies, including large ones, decided to leave UCINA as they did not feel “represented.” These include CRN, Azimut Benetti, Ferretti and Apreamare. According to UCINA, the choice “was acted upon when the withdrawing companies realized that their candidate would not garner the necessary support.”

Ucina recalls that the association’s Board of Directors had collected through the Wise Men the expressions of votes from the Members who had voted 70 percent in favor of Carla Demaria (Montecarlo Yachts) and 15 percent in favor of Lamberto Tacoli, of the CRN Group (15 percent). Nevertheless, he had decided to submit the two nominations to the assembly.

THE “J’ACCUSE” OF THE SPILLERS
In this letter, the UCINA leavers set out their reasons and directly attack Carla Demaria’s candidacy (as well as UCINA’s role, which they say has been reduced to a mere organizer of the Genoa Boat Show)

“Dear Associates,

We are writing to inform you of our particularly painful decision to leave the Association and to explain to you, dear Colleagues, before others, the reasons for this decision.

For some time now, we have not felt represented by UCINA, even though our companies are important realities in terms of value-not just economic value-for the history, size, importance and international prestige of the Italian Nautica.

We do not feel represented, in the first place, in that it is no longer possible to find within the Association open ground for debate, an indispensable element for considering a change in horizon and operations that, prevailing over individual positions, should aim at the collective interest. Some of us have made constructive proposals for an evolution of the Association, which have been challenged for form instead of being evaluated in substance and addressed in an unprejudiced debate, which seems to be no longer viable even within the Council.

We are not willing to fuel a dynamic that is counterproductive for the entire Sector through an Association split into opposing factions. We express multiple interests, but it is not by dividing into opposing factions that we will respond to such varieties of needs; the goal of a trade association must be and remain the pursuit of mutual interest. We will not be the ones representing one of these factions.

We also believe that the purpose of the Association cannot and should not be focused primarily on organizing the Genoa Boat Show. The Italian Boating Industry, of which every member company, regardless of size and turnover, is an excellent expression, deserves much more: enlightened action that should become effective at the national and international level, like those of other counterpart Associations in other categories.

We would like to make it clear that our decision to leave the Association has nothing to do with participation in the upcoming Genoa Show(s); this decision will remain at the discretion of individual member and non-member companies.

The Italian Boating Industry, with all its companies large or small, represents one of the flagships of our extraordinary country that all of us, with our daily work, try to defend and promote in the World. We find it incongruous that UCINA, and therefore Made in Italy, can be represented by a manager, however well prepared and highly respectable, who is an organic expression of a major foreign group that has only minimal interests in Italy and whose production plants, employment levels and creation of induced activities are concentrated in a country that is a competitor of Sistema Italia. What credibility would we have abroad?

For these reasons, we have decided to resign from the Association. With regret for the result, but pride and awareness of having promoted an action for the common good of the Italian Boating Industry, the choice to leave in order not to want to divide, which-we are sure-many of you will appreciate, is a gesture of wisdom and respect for all the companies, entrepreneurs and managers of this sector

With our warmest regards.

They sign:
Apreamare
Arcadia Yachts
Azimut Benetti Group
Bay
Crn
Ferretti Group
Maltese
Marina of Varazze
Mase Generators
Sail

NOW?
So many possible hypotheses after this split. These include the birth of a possible “UCINA 2.” A very Italian mess…