Bidding Halted by Marks & Spencer

In light of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Marks & Spencer (London) has announced it is putting the bidding of its U.S. holdings on hold.

The British retailer had been auctioning off its Kings Super Market and Brooks Brothers apparel chains and had been hoping to make an announcement later this month. Just a week ago, a rumor indicated that the bid list for the Brooks Brother operation was down to May Department Stores (St. Louis), Dickson Concepts (Hong Kong), Tommy Hilfiger (New York) and Texas Pacific Group (Fort Worth, Texas), a private investment firm that owns the J. Crew Group (as well as Oxford Health Plans, Magellan Health Services, Ducati Motor and semiconductor maker ZiLOG). Kings, based in New Jersey, operates 25 supermarkets in that state.

“We e-mailed everybody who we are talking to and told them to concentrate on their own people for the time being. That is what is important,” said an M&S spokeswoman. The British retailer announced earlier this year that it was divesting of all non-U.K.-based holdings, both in the U.S. and Continental Europe, to raise needed capital and concentrate on its roughly 300 Marks & Spencer stores in Britain. M&S is the U.K.'s largest apparel retailer.

On the European front, a rumor out of France has U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart (Bentonville, Ark.) in the bidding for Marks & Spencer's 38 retail stores in France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. According to the French publication Le Point, Wal-Mart sees this as an opportunity to compete with Carrefour, its largest global rival. French retailers Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR) and Galeries Lafayette have been known to be on M&S's bid list for these stores, along with Japanese discount clothing chain Uniqlo.