Russian opposition member Alexei Navalny created a website to document the rampant corruption at the Sochi Olympics. The site is a map with clickable regions showing how illegal dumping, graft, inside dealing, and general sleaze caused billions of dollars to disappear into the pockets of Russian political elites and their mafiyeh buddies. The site was translated to English by the Interpreter, which notes:
As Navalny describes on his blog, the Fund designed the site because they were “sick of looking at how the numbers of Olympic construction projects were being juggled” by Russian officials. In particular, he referred to a statement by Vice Premier Dmitry Kozak that a total of 214 billion rubles was spent on the Olympics.
The main page of “Encyclopedia of Expenses” shows the calculation by which the overall expenditures on the Olympic Games came to 1.5 trillion rubles. This figure was obtained by combining the expenditures fro the federal budget on the sports facilities and infrastructure (822 billion rubles), the expenditures of state companies (343 billions), the loans provided by Vneshekonombank (249 billion), private investments (53 billion), and the budget expenditures of Krasnodar Territory (33 billion rubles).
The authors of the research further included in the total sum all the loans from Vneshekonombank (VEB), which the Olympic investors received, expecting that they would not be returned. This contradicts the statements of the bank itself that there are only loans totaling 190 billion rubles that possibly have to be restructured.
