‘Billions stolen’ during Winter Olympics preparation

RUSSIAN officials and businessmen have stolen billions of dollars during the years of preparations for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, a prominent Russian opposition figure has claimed.

The 2014 Winter Games will be held in Sochi. Picture: Contributed

Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister-turned-Kremlin critic, and an associate said in a report released that up to $30 billion (£19.7bn) was stolen in the run-up to the games in the southern Russian city.

Russia had originally announced in 2007 that the 2014 games would cost about $12 billion. Within six years, that estimate went up to $51bn, making Sochi the most expensive Olympics in history, winter or summer. In contrast, the 2012 London Summer Olympics cost $14.3 billion.

Nemtsov arrived at the figure of $30bn by comparing the initial cost estimate of the Games with the final $51bn price tag and with typical cost overruns at previous Olympics.

He also compared the per-seat cost of Sochi’s Olympic stadium with stadiums at previous games.

Nemtsov said the difference between the initial and final costs of Olympic games in the past 14 years was two-fold on average – in contrast to four-fold in Sochi’s case.

“We account this irregularity for corruption, fraud, sloppiness and unprofessionalism,” Nemtsov said at a press conference in Moscow. He did not provide a specific breakdown of the overruns that formed the basis of his estimate of corruption. “It’s up to investigators to do so,” he said.

Russia is notorious for the extensive corruption that prevails in many fields, especially in construction, and the number of new venues needed to host the games in Sochi could have offered ample opportunities for theft.

Preparations for the Sochi games included not only building an Olympic stadium, three Olympic villages, a ski jump, hockey arenas, Alpine facilities and an Olympic cross-country venue but major upgrades to the city’s roads, bridges, hotels, trains, port, airport and its underlying power grid.

Alexander Zhukov, president of the Russian Olympic Committee, said he needed time to analyse the figures in Nemtsov’s report but expressed confidence that Russian prosecutors and the audit chamber are keeping an eye on Olympic costs.

Zhukov defended some of the cost overruns, however, explaining that authorities had to build additional infrastructure at some of the venues, thus raising the total cost.

Jean-Claude Killy, the French Alpine skiing star who now heads the International Olympic Committee’s co-ordination commission for the Sochi games, sounded fatalistic about the potential for corruption in the Black Sea city. “I don’t recall an Olympics without corruption,” he said.