Good men in a crisis

"The credit crunch has not yet finished. Currently most banks are mainly trying to reduce the amount of leveraging, which is why there are few possibilities of obtaining financing on the market unless a project is located in one of the biggest cities in Poland," says David Sharkey, founder of Irish developer Caelum Development. Together with its Hungarian partner Futureal, it opened the Nova Park shopping centre in Gorzów Wielkopolski (with a leasable area of 32,400 sqm) on April 18th. "We are not planning any projects in the biggest cities in Poland. It seems to me that they are oversaturated with malls," explains David Sharkey. The company's strategy is to construct shopping centres in good locations in smaller towns with the intention of securing the position of being the dominant centre in a given area. Caelum Development built its portfolio of projects between 2004 and 2009 and is not planning to start any new ones. The company had also been an active developer in Germany and Hun