The largest private-equity firm in the world, Blackstone Group LP, agreed to buy Centro Properties Group’s selection of U. S. shopping centers for an amount of $9.4 billion, two people aware of the matter said.

The purchase of five hundred and eighty eight malls, at the market price they were valued at as of Dec. 31, may enable Centro’s Australian operations to run as an independent company, said one of the people, who declined to be named before an official statement. The deal may get announced as early as today, the person said.

Centro, based in Melbourne manages sixteen and a half billion Australian dollars or seventeen billion dollars of shopping malls in Australia, New Zealand and America went up to sell assets two years after its acquisition spree in the U. S. got boomeranged as the world’s largest economy fell and debt costs soared.

The company had as many as sixteen billion Australian dollars of debt across all its businesses as of Dec. 31, with 3.1 billion Australian dollars of loans due by the end of this year.

If Centro is going to get a reported capital return from the sale of their U. S. assets, the numbers would be justified, said Michael Wood, who helps to monitor $5.1 billion at Quadrant Real Estate Advisors in Sydney.

If the price that the firm is getting is close to net tangible assets that are a good sign. People are cautiously upbeat about U. S. retail sales, so this is probably a good bet on the part of Blackstone.

A spokeswoman for Centro Miche Paterson, at communications firm Kreab Gavin Anderson, did not make a reply of the voicemail message. Peter Rose, a spokesman of Blackstone, in New York, didn’t answer to an e-mail seeking comment outside business hours.

The Wall Street Journal reported of the sale earlier today.

The purchase would be Blackstone’s largest after the acquisition of Hilton Worldwide Inc., which got completed in October 2007, as per data compiled by Bloomberg.