Our battlefield

  managed by the military under orders from above into a commercial enterprise respected on the free market?

 The nomination of a new president has been the first move on the road to improvement. Maciej Olex-Szczytowski is an experienced investment manager who graduated from Cambridge and the London School of Economics, and then went on to gain experience working for Citibank of New York and Lloyds Bank of London. One of Mr. Olex-Szczytowski’s first decisions was to employ the Colliers agency to carry out a market assessment of properties earmarked for sale and owned by the MPA, the Ministry of National Defence and the Military Housing Agency.

This is only one of many moves to demolish the old structure. The previous concept of establishing a company to modernise and manage all military heating systems is being modified. The original project was established without a business plan or even a cost calculation. The sense of such outsourcing will soon be approved (or rejected) by the Andersen and Deloitte agencies.

New principles defined

Maciej Olex-Szczytowski also reveals that: “Real estate has been sold ‘sauté’ up to the present and lower than its true value. But now we shall be establishing added value, with the properties being offered for tender coming with stipulations over how they can be developed. We can expect much higher prices in this way. We also intend to negotiate a share of the profits of the developers make from buying land from the MPA.”

 The MPA also intends to begin two large investments – the development of a Polish Military Museum and a “Polish Pentagon” – to be the headquarters of all the most important institutions related to national defence. Little is yet known about the first scheme, but the project for the Ministry of Defence HQ has already generated huge interest at what is still its planning stage. What will be one of Europe’s largest military constructions will probably be built on ul. Żwirki i Wigury, not far from Warsaw International Airport. The investment is expected to create a lot of savings for the Ministry of Defence, since an estimate carried out some two years ago reveals that when all military institutions are moved to one location, around PLN 130 mln savings will result, while additional profit will come from selling the previous facilities, since the military owns 340,000 sqm of office space in Warsaw. President Olex-Szczytowski remarks that: “We first have to analyze whether it would be better to develop both buildings within public-private partnerships or by using only our own resources with the use of bank loans.”

The MPA, however, does not cost much to run. Each of the 470 people employed manages a real estate portfolio of PLN 2.9 mln, which compares favourably with its British equivalent – the Defence Estates agency –