Trinci­ty Mall and Long Cir­cu­lar Mall are not for sale.

Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert ad­dressed re­ports in "in­ac­cu­rate" ar­ti­cles that the pop­u­lar shop­ping malls were to be list­ed for sale by liq­uida­tors.

"No de­ci­sion has been made to sell those two malls," said Im­bert dur­ing the Post Cab­i­net press brief­ing, " What I can tell you is that the liq­uida­tor is in the process of get­ting val­u­a­tions of the as­sets be­cause in or­der to dis­pose of the CL Fi­nan­cial as­sets and the Cli­co as­sets the liq­uida­tor is re­quired by the court."

Home Con­struc­tion Ltd (HCL), a CL Fi­nan­cial sub­sidiary, is cur­rent­ly the own­er of the re­tail malls.

The Min­is­ter al­so ex­plained that sell­ing the malls at this time would not be wise, giv­en the stark im­pact on shop­ping malls dur­ing this pan­dem­ic pe­ri­od.

Sev­er­al stores in malls have been forced to close down.

Many ten­ants in Trinci­ty Mall al­so ex­pressed the be­lief that their stores would be closed by the end of the year.

"The first thing the liq­uida­tors would have to do is get val­u­a­tions, hav­ing got them, then the board of the com­pa­ny would sit down and de­ter­mine whether this is the right time be­cause, for ex­am­ple, the val­ue of a shop­ping mall in 2020 in the mid­dle of COVID you don't need to be an ex­pert is much less than what it was in 2019 I mean one of the sec­tors that has been af­fect­ed most pro­found­ly by COVID is re­tail out­lets in a shop­ping mall," said Im­bert, "So that cer­tain­ly the val­ue of a shop­ping mall in the mid­dle of this COVID sit­u­a­tion would be far less than it would have been a year or two ago, so it's not a good time to sell."

He said be­cause of this he asked for the val­u­a­tion to be done on the prop­er­ty based on its op­er­a­tions be­fore the pan­dem­ic.

"There's noth­ing wrong with get­ting a val­u­a­tion in 2020 and what I've asked them to do is to get a 2019 val­u­a­tion as well. So let's see what the re­duc­tion in val­ue would be and that will in­form any de­ci­sion that will be tak­en," he said.

Ten­ants from Trinci­ty Mall al­so con­tact­ed Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day con­cerned about the re­port as some be­lieved the stores in the mall had al­ready closed.