London-based Reed Elsevier is said to have allowed first round bidders for its trade magazine publishing arm, Reed Business Information, to re-submit their bids last week.

The re-submission, which wasn't officially the second round, was permitted because certain bidders "felt they were not provided with enough information" on RBI during the first round, a Reuters news report [1] said.

It was not immediately clear what that information was, nor which group re-submitted bids. A Reed Elsevier spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment.

The new bids came in "slightly lower" than in the first round, the report said.

According to DeSilva + Phillips managing partner Reed Phillips, allowing re-submitted bids is a bit "unusal," but the move enabled the bidders to put together "a more precise expression" of their interest.

Last week, German publishing group Gruner + Jahr, which made a dramatic exit from the U.S. magazine market in 2005, confirmed that it had entered the second-round bidding [1] war for RBI. UBS, the bank that's organizing the RBI sale, is said to have invited more than 10 groups, including McGraw-Hill and private equity firm Bain Capital, to submit their second round offers [1].

In releasing its first half financial results, Reed Elsevier last month said it expects the RBI divestiture to be complete sometime within the second half of the year [1]. The value of the original first-round bids was said to have ranged between $1.87 billion and $2.33 billion.

RBI publishes a number of trade magazines including Variety and Publishers Weekly, Reed Elsevier announced in February that it was putting RBI on the block.