Ratner Wants to Buy Back H.Samuel

Gerald Ratner is reportedly in talks with British banks to raise £150 million ($286 million) to finance a bid to buy the jewelry chain store H.Samuel from Signet. Ratner lost his popular jewelry chain in 1991 after calling the items he sold “total crap.”

Over a decade after losing control of the Ratner Group, now Signet, Ratner wants to purchase Signet’s subsidiary H.Samuel, according to the British press.

There has been talk in the market about a possible bid for several weeks. Though Ratner declined to discuss how he will finance the deal, over the weekend he said he was under the impression that Signet is interested in selling off its U.K. business to focus on its U.S. retail operations.

The Signet Group is the world’s largest specialty retail jeweler and the largest U.S. specialty retail jeweler by sales, with an approximately 3.9 percent share of the $59 billion total jewelry market.

Signet’s U.K. operations include 591 stores, primarily situated in prime high street locations (main shopping thoroughfares with high pedestrian traffic) or shopping malls, under the names H.Samuel, Ernest Jones, and Leslie Davis. The chain accounts for about 17 percent of the £3.4 billion British jewelry market.

In the U.S. Signet has 1,221 stores in all 50 states, operating Kay Jewelers in malls and Jared The Galleria Of Jewelry in superstores.

Recently Signet entered into preliminary merger discussions with Zale, which did not materialize. The sides did not reveal any details about the talks or why they failed.