The internet is flooded with posts saying that “the roof of the luge and bobsleigh track in Sochi collapsed under the weight of snow.” I tried to find some reliable confirmation of this (articles in reputable media, photos, video), but found nothing credible. It seems they’re saying the roof of the starting ramp collapsed, but that would be easy to repair. Still, the ease with which people picked up the story and started spreading it shows a colossal lack of trust in both the quality of construction and any official information coming out of Sochi. Especially since we already know about the Olympic port that was “washed away by a storm,” and we remember Putin’s public dressing-down of Bilalov, which generated a lot of noise and tough talk and ended in nothing. At the Anti-Corruption Foundation, we very much hope that nothing collapses or falls apart during the Olympics, but we would not be at all surprised if it does. The financing of the Olympic facilities has been deliberately structured in such a way that it is almost impossible for us to monitor it fully, but even the part we can see and work on gives rise to serious skepticism about the quality of the work and points to completely obvious corruption. For example. There is an entity called the “Main Construction Directorate of Krasnodar Krai.” It embezzles distributes, among other things, federal and regional money for the construction of Olympic facilities. On December 2, these crooks posted a procurement order worth 604 million rubles.
http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=7840020 The money is for the “execution of contract work on the project ‘Engineering and transport infrastructure networks in the area of the village of Razdolnoye, Khosta District, Sochi (design and survey work, construction)’ (stage 2.1).” A fairly large sum of money ($20 million) is being spent on important but fairly routine construction work. Sewerage, utility networks, and so on. Hundreds of construction companies could do this kind of work, and we all have the right to want it done well, on time, and at a competitive market price. On the other hand, we all understand that Governor Tkachev and his state institution, GUSKK, have different intentions: bring in their own company, award it the contract at the maximum price, pocket a kickback of around 50 percent, and let the company build whatever it can with what remains. So what’s to be done? Good old backyard cunning comes to the governor’s rescue! If his niece became a billionaire at 22, then clearly her uncle is no fool either. An excerpt from the state contract, which is part of the tender documentation:
WHAT-WHAT-WHAT?! any normal person will cry out. How can that possibly be? According to the notice, the deadline for submitting bids is 12/12/2013. By law, the bids are reviewed the next day. The protocol is published the same day. The contract may be signed no earlier than 7 days after publication of the protocol, i.e. no earlier than 12/20/2013. That means the entire construction project is supposed to take 7 days. Once again: the state treasury institution “Main Construction Directorate of Krasnodar Krai” put construction work worth 604 million rubles out to tender, setting a completion period of 7 days. But an attentive reader will already have noticed another important line:
That is exactly how it works. If you are an outside contractor who came to compete for the job and are not prepared to pay a kickback, then you will see Krasnodar officials in roughly this form:
But if you are ready to bring back a little suitcase with 300 million rubles from the contract amount, then on the eighth day of contract performance they will “switch on” clause 3.3 of the state contract for you and extend it by a miserable 34 times. So what if they were off by a factor of 34 on the deadline. The most astonishing thing is that these brazen crooks are not even embarrassed to do this despite the fact that the tender documentation includes an approved positive conclusion from the state expert review, which clearly and unambiguously gives us the benchmark for the contract completion period:
Eight months. And in the state contract: 7 days. Magnificent. So who will win this contract? I can venture a guess that it will be Yug Stroy 1 LLC (Tax ID 2320159594), which already “won” the “competition” for the first phase of the project with a highly dubious pricing protocol that looks very much like price-fixing.
A quick Google search will tell us that in 2011, a grenade was thrown at businessman Elugyan. One assumes that things are going well for him now: he threw the grenade where it needed to go, and is now successfully helping himself to budget money together with Krasnodar officials. Maybe it will be someone else. But there is not the slightest doubt that only someone who has agreed on a “kickback” with the state treasury institution “Main Construction Directorate of Krasnodar Krai” can “take” this contract. So subtract the amount of the “kickback” from the cost of the contracted work. That is exactly how much the contractor saved on quality, because the facility still has to be delivered. That is why facilities built for the APEC summit in Vladivostok are falling apart, and why facilities built for the Sochi Olympics will fall apart too. This case at the Anti-Corruption Foundation is being handled by Valery Zolotukhin. Send him anything interesting you have on GUSKK and the other crooks connected to them. We have, of course, appealed the procurement. We’ll also write to the Investigative Committee (Russia’s main federal investigative authority) and let them investigate; this is clearly an organized criminal group. If you like what the Anti-Corruption Foundation does, support us—the Foundation exists on donations from private individuals.