"Not for sale": Greenland tells Donald Trump, denounce purchase reports

Washington : The Greenland on Friday denounced reports claiming that Donald Trump is seeking advice from his advisors on purchasing the biggest Island on Earth.

"We are open for business, but we're not for sale," Greenland's foreign minister Ane Lone Bagger told Reuters.

Donald Trump has been scheduled to visit Copenhagen in September and the Arctic will be on the agenda during meetings with the prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory.

The Wall Street first reported that there will be talks of purchase of Greenland. However, two sources close to the matter told Reuters that the matter has been laughed off by some advisers as a joke but was taken more seriously by others in the White House.

Danish politicians on Friday poured scorn on the idea.

"It has to be an April Fool's joke. Totally out of season," former prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said on Twitter.

"If he is truly contemplating this, then this is final proof, that he has gone mad," foreign affairs spokesman for the Danish People's Party, Soren Espersen, told broadcaster DR.

"The thought of Denmark selling 50,000 citizens to the United States is completely ridiculous," he said.

Greenland, a self-ruling part of Denmark located between the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, is dependant on Danish economic support. It handles its own domestic affairs while Copenhagen looks after defence and foreign policy.

"I am sure a majority in Greenland believes it is better to have a relation to Denmark than the United States, in the long term," Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, Danish MP from Greenland's second-largest party Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA), told Reuters.

"My immediate thought is 'No, thank you'," she said.