Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg has joined other auction houses in postponing a scheduled sale in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center.

In this case the Paris-based auction house’s sale of a rare blue diamond and other jewels planned for New York on Oct. 24 has been rescheduled to Dec. 3, Reuters reported.

The auction is being mounted around the sale of the diamond qualified as having a “maximum saturation of blue” and which is expected to fetch more than $5 million, Reuters reported.

Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg is a unit of the world’s biggest luxury goods group, LVMH Moet Hennessy-Louis Vuitton.

Its inaugural New York sale of rare jewels from private collections will include a 1.92 carat red diamond that auctioneers expect to sell for more than $1 million per carat. It also includes more recent creations from Bulgari, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Cartier, and an 8.59 carat “pigeon blood” ruby from Burma’s Mogok mines and mounted into a Tiffany setting from 1932.

Other auction houses have already announced postponement of planned sales. Antiquorum, a world-leading auctioneer in horology postponed its New York watch auction originally scheduled for September 20. Sotheby’s of London rescheduled sales at its New York location, including its Asian Week sales of Indian, Southeast Asian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese works of art (moved from Sept. 15 to Oct. 11 – 17). Christies revised the dates for 14 of it U.S. sales, including a Chinese ceramics and fine art sale, at its Rockefeller Plaza, New York, location (now, Oct. 16).

JCK