What a wonderful story—have a read: Yekaterinburg. Minister Mutko. Two “middlemen.” Hundreds of millions. There was a stadium:
in 2011 it was renovated at enormous expense:
And now they want to demolish it in order to build a new stadium for the FIFA World Cup hosted by Russia:
A rather odd decision, isn’t it? Then why renovate it in the first place? Well, fine—let’s assume we’re very stupid, and they’re very smart and understand something the rest of us don’t. But that’s only a small part of the story. The real story is that 898 million rubles were allocated for the stadium’s design (just the design work).
http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/contracts/info/common_info/show?contractInfoId=7865341 After that, the contest’s “winner” (a state-owned company) handed the design work off to a subcontractor for 683 million, and they in turn passed it on to a sub-subcontractor for a far smaller amount. Lovely. How easily and elegantly these “businessmen” close to our chief state sportsman, Vitaly Mutko, make hundreds of millions of rubles
As for sports and medals, things haven’t been going so well for us lately. But when it comes to contracts and subcontracts, we’ve gotten so good at it that we’d win any “gold” in the global competition for “who can build a stadium at the highest price.” And total silence, of course. No Investigative Committee, no FSB (Federal Security Service), no wiretaps, no surveillance. What a beautiful picture.
Can you imagine how much money they stole with tricks like this during the Olympics—and how much they’ll steal for the 2018 World Cup?