 Ahold had refused to consider a spinoff of the subsidiary to the capital markets, and appeared to be headed toward an auction that JP Morgan would manage.This was consistent with many larger going concerns in the United States that appeared to be headed away from being publicly traded in what many believed was an attempt to avoid the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.After the internal accounting controls and procedures struggles that U.S. Foodservice had gone through over the past 3 years—the very same that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was designed to address—one had to wonder if U.S. Foodservice being privately held was the proper path toward a transparent valuation of the company.