Jour­nal­ist Max­ie Cuffie is re­main­ing tight-lipped about why he has de­cid­ed not to pur­chase the Mir­ror Group at the end of his cur­rent lease, which has sparked the in­ter­est of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er. Dur­ing a brief in­ter­view yes­ter­day, Cuffie, the own­er of In­te­grat­ed Me­dia Com­pa­ny Ltd, said he did not want to com­ment on why he de­cid­ed to give up the Mir­ror, which he leased a year ago, with the in­ten­tion of pos­si­ble pur­chase from Choko Hold­ings. " I don't have any com­ment and it's not be­cause I have any­thing to hide," Cuffie said. Pressed on con­cerns about po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence in the news­pa­per and his fu­ture goals, Cuffie said: "Let me think about it and I will get back to you."

How­ev­er, fur­ther calls to his cell­phone up to press time went unan­swered. Cuffie, whose jour­nal­ism ca­reer spans 29 years, be­gan as a trainee re­porter at the Trinidad Ex­press be­fore go­ing on to be­come ed­i­tor of the Sun­day Guardian, the T&T Guardian, the In­de­pen­dent and the Sun­day Ex­press, and is a for­mer head of news at CCN TV6. Mir­ror re­porters yes­ter­day al­so de­clined to com­ment on the prospect of the pa­per chang­ing hands, say­ing they need­ed per­mis­sion to do so. Ed­i­tor Irene Med­i­na was said to be in a meet­ing and did not re­turn calls. The Mir­ror Group pub­lish­es the TnT Mir­ror, the TnT Mir­ror Week­end, the Sun­day Punch and Show­time. It is owned by Choko Hold­ings Ltd, which al­so owns a 39.1 per cent share of Dai­ly News, pub­lish­ers of the News­day news­pa­per.

Last week, Warn­er re­vealed he had dis­cus­sions with Choko Hold­ings on ac­quir­ing sub­stan­tial shares in the com­pa­ny. This move has been crit­i­cised by Op­po­si­tion MP Colm Im­bert who said it would be a breach of the In­tegri­ty Act if Warn­er bought the news­pa­pers. A state­ment pub­lished in the Mir­ror yes­ter­day said: "There have been sev­er­al ex­pres­sions of in­ter­est, in­clud­ing in­vestors rep­re­sent­ing var­i­ous po­lit­i­cal per­sua­sions across the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty." The Mir­ror said in­ter­ests had been ex­pressed by oth­er me­dia en­ti­ties, but added: "Ab­solute­ly no de­ci­sion has been tak­en, how­ev­er, since the com­pa­ny has yet to re­ceive any pro­pos­al that meets the min­i­mum con­di­tion for the sale of these ex­treme­ly valu­able me­dia as­sets."