BBC NEWS | Business | Is Sainsbury's set to be taken over?

I love grocery stores and we just covered leasing in my Problems in Finance Class, so I couldn't pass this one up:

BBC NEWS | Business | Is Sainsbury's set to be taken over?:

"While it has not revealed any details of its proposed plans, retail analysts agree that the consortium has its eyes on the property value of the Sainsbury's stores, which are often located in city centres where commercial property is expensive.

'They would sell off a huge chuck of the Sainsbury's stores, and then lease them back,' says David Stoddard of Teather and Greenwood.

'This could release a huge amount of cash.'"

Of course this assumes that the private equity group has better access to capital (someone has to provide the cash). This was touched on later in the article:

"However, the other major factor that most analysts say would enable the Sainsbury's board to successfully see off any bid, is the private equity group's expected plans for major store sales and lease backs.

"The Sainsbury's management are in a very strong position,"...."They can, for example, simply say to the shareholders that they will sell off the stores themselves, that they can do this on their own without a private equity group having to take its slice.""

mmm...wouldn't this make a nice essay? "Give economically justified reasons why a lease would/would not make sense in the Sainsbury case."