JSM Financial: European buyout Triton firm is bidding to buy Germany’s Karstadt department stores.

April 26, 2010 - PRLog -- With what JSM Financial believes is the only bid, European private equity firm Triton has recently submitted an offer to purchase insolvent German department store chain Karstadt in its entirety to the court-appointed administrator Klaus Hubert Goerg.

The buyout firm said it had delivered an offer which would enable Karstadt to continue operating as a going concern but indicated that both the chain store's staff and lessors would need to make further sacrifices before the acquisition plans could go ahead.

"We need cooperation on the basis of further concessions in order to make a sustainable restructuring possible," JSM Financial believes a Triton source was quoted as saying.

Sources close to the matter say that Karstadt’s main creditors, including the property owners of the 120 stores will discuss the offer amid doubts over whether they or representatives of the 26,000 employees would be prepared to accept the terms.

Karstadt, with stores in almost all of Germany’s larger cities was Germany’s most famous victim of the 2009 recession.

The blame for the fall of Karstadt, JSM Financial understands, is largely laid at the feet of the firms parent company’s Chief Executive Thomas Middelhoff who was responsible for divesting all of the chains properties in sale-and-lease back deals with a number of real estate firms, one of which counted Middelhoff as a chief investor. The parent company Arcandor AG imploded after it failed to extract a state bailout.

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