Sochi Olympics: Most Corrupt In History
The Sochi Olympic games will be the most expensive ever held, by an egregious amount. $51 billion in total, and since Winter Olympics are smaller than Summer games, the Russian government is spending an average of $520 million per event—four times as much as the previous record-holder, China. Where is all the money going? Into various pockets, naturally.
We will never know the full extent of the corruption, but Joshua Yaffa in Bloomberg Businessweek provides one of the best big-picture looks at the mess that Sochi has become. The "how" varies, but the "why" is remarkably simple: Since Moscow openly views these games as a prestige project to bring about the economic revitalization of the Caucasus region, private and government contractors knew they had a blank check to charge whatever they wanted—and Russia's pervasive tradition of kickbacks means no one was going to complain if they charged more than the projects actually cost.
For one example, two oligarch brothers who were childhood friends of Vladimir Putin received $7 billion worth of contracts. One was for an undersea pipeline, the final cost of which broke down to about $5.5 million per kilometer, or almost four times as much as the European average.
In another case, a 31-mile rail and road link to the site of the ski and snowboard events cost $8.7 billion, more than the entire cost of the last Winter Olympics. For that price tag, one Russian magazine calculated, the road could have been paved with a centimeter of beluga caviar
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http://deadspin.com/how-the-sochi-olympics-became-a-51-billion-quagmire-1493890966
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