Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write. A developer is paying $430 million to leave a shopping mall.

Normally it goes the other way. The shop pays the landlord. The tenant begs for a break on the rent. Here the big guy is writing the cheque to walk away.

The mall is 11 Skies, the airport project. New World Development is the company, and the Cheng family controls it. The FT says the company posted a $3.6 billion loss, after a run of what accountants call impairment charges.

Let me translate that, because nobody at a bank will.

An impairment charge is the company admitting a thing is worth less than it said last year. You bought a wok for a hundred. Now you say it's worth forty. The sixty has to go somewhere, and it goes into the loss. Do that on a whole mall and the number gets big fast.

Now think about that from the shopper's side. Most of us have never needed a reason to go to the airport mall. You go if you're flying. You go if you're early. You wander round for twenty minutes and then you find your gate.

That is a hard crowd to build a mall around. Somebody in a meeting room looked at a big plan and a lot of planes and saw a lot of shoppers. The shoppers had a flight to catch.

I'm not saying I called it. I run a noodle stall. But when you build somewhere people only pass through, you should ask whether anyone will stay.

The company is a big developer with a lot of other projects, so it will be fine. The people with the smaller stakes in all this should read the accounts closely.