Caelum Developments, the international property development outfit run by the Sharkey family, has apparently appointed a contractor to carry out work at ParkLake, the massive shopping mall it is building in Bucharest in conjunction with another outfit called Sonae Sierra.
Hopefully, for sure this time, finally.
ParkLake, which from its plans looks like the Dundrum Town Centre of Romania, has had a few false starts and has been in planning since the pre-crash days.
There were early hold-ups and also that pesky global financial crash.
In late 2007, David Sharkey said the “US sub-prime crisis” as it was then was having “very little influence on the region”.
Two years later, Romania was asking the IMF for a loan after its economy shrank by almost 7 per cent.
The Sharkeys made a fortune a few years back with several developments in Poland. Des Sharkey, the family's patriarch and a well-known member of the horsey set, is also an investor alongside Dermot Desmond in Mountain Province Diamonds, which owns almost half of the world's richest new diamond mine, Gahcho Kue in Canada.
The mine’s owners this week signed an impact benefit agreement with a local indigenous tribe, the Northwest Territory Métis Nation. Gahcho Kue sits on an estimated $20 billion of diamonds. A sparkling investment.
