Trinci­ty Com­mer­cial Cen­tre, which in­cludes Trinci­ty Mall, has been sold for $505 mil­lion. The deal was fi­nalised last week, with a con­sor­tium of re­al es­tate de­vel­op­ers—John­ny Aboud, An­tho­ny Ra­hael, and con­trac­tors Kall­Co and Fides Ltd—se­cur­ing the prop­er­ty.

The Trinci­ty Com­mer­cial Cen­tre was part of the CL Fi­nan­cial (CLF) group, which is in liq­ui­da­tion.

Last Oc­to­ber, ANSA McAL, then the pre­ferred bid­der to ac­quire Trinci­ty Mall, with­drew from the trans­ac­tion, and the mall was re-list­ed for sale.

The liq­uida­tors, Grant Thorn­ton, were grant­ed ap­proval for the sale in 2021, but it was on­ly put on the mar­ket in Sep­tem­ber 2022.

Ac­cord­ing to the 13th re­port of the Joint Liq­uida­tors (JL) by Grant Thorn­ton, ANSA with­drew from the sale pri­or to ex­e­cut­ing the SPA (Sale and Pur­chase Agree­ment).

The ad­ver­tise­ment at the time not­ed that the mall in­clud­ed 53.6 acres of prime land and 14 acres of un­de­vel­oped land.

Of that sum, 661 sq ft is a pur­pose-built build­ing space with 490 square feet of gross leasable space. The op­por­tu­ni­ties iden­ti­fied for the po­ten­tial buy­er were 14 acres of un­used land for de­vel­op­ment and ex­pan­sion pur­pos­es for fu­ture rev­enue po­ten­tial, rental in­come from over 295 stores and kiosks, ac­cess to prime re­al es­tate in Trinidad, and that Trinci­ty Mall is strate­gi­cal­ly placed on the East-West cor­ri­dor of the is­land, with clear high­way vis­i­bil­i­ty and easy ac­cess to pub­lic trans­port.

In the 12th Liq­uida­tor Re­port dat­ed Oc­to­ber 2023, the liq­uida­tors not­ed that in April 2023, they had re­ceived a to­tal of four of­fers—two for the shares in TC­CL and two for Trinci­ty Mall prop­er­ty as­sets.

“None of the of­fers re­ceived were equal to or high­er than the ap­proved, min­i­mum sale val­ue(s) as­cribed to the as­set via the or­der made by the Court on 11th No­vem­ber 2021 which, in­ter alia, per­mits the JLs to sell the shares in TC­CL or Trinci­ty Mall,” they not­ed.

The liq­uida­tors said they con­duct­ed an analy­sis of the bind­ing of­fers and ul­ti­mate­ly se­lect­ed a pre­ferred bid­der, which HCL’s board ap­proved on May 12, 2023.

“Fur­ther ne­go­ti­a­tions with this se­lect­ed bid­der re­gard­ing sale term par­tic­u­lars are cur­rent­ly un­der­way and are due to be agreed up­on short­ly. Due to the of­fers re­ceived be­ing low­er than the min­i­mum sale val­ue ap­proved by the court, it is an­tic­i­pat­ed that the JLs will need to ap­ply to the court for ap­proval to com­plete the sale,” the re­port stat­ed.

“Pre­lim­i­nary prepa­ra­tions for this have been com­plet­ed, and a for­mal ap­pli­ca­tion will be made once a sale agree­ment has been fi­nalised. In par­al­lel, the JLs have con­tin­ued to at­tend the pre­vi­ous­ly ref­er­enced bi­week­ly meet­ings of an HCL project team re­gard­ing Trinci­ty Mall’s di­vest­ment strat­e­gy to man­age op­er­a­tions as well as mon­i­tor and progress the sale process.”

Trinci­ty Com­mer­cial Cen­tre and the mall were con­sid­ered the jew­els of Home Con­struc­tion Lim­it­ed (HCL). Long Cir­cu­lar Mall is al­so up for sale.

Since 2017, CLF has been un­der liq­ui­da­tion, which is be­ing man­aged by Grant Thorn­ton.

In 2020, the liq­uida­tors in­di­cat­ed their in­ten­tion to pre­pare the prop­er­ties for di­vest­ment.

The CLF Group had ear­li­er sold HCL’s Val­park and At­lantic Plaza malls to gen­er­ate cash flow for the con­glom­er­ate.

Once the liq­ui­da­tion was an­nounced, the sale of Trinci­ty Mall, and even­tu­al­ly Long Cir­cu­lar Mall, was in­evitable.

How­ev­er, the pan­dem­ic af­fect­ed the pace at which the sale pro­ceed­ed.