Putin Seeks to Form a Special Department for Olympic Spending

Filed in archive Winter Adventures on July 9, 2007

After successfully being awarded the 2014 Winter olympic games last week, President Vladimir Putin is seeking to form a government department to oversee games spending. His purpose for the overall is the prevent embezzlement.

So far, Russia has promised to spent an estimated $12 billion dollars on the transformation of Sochi to an acceptable sports complex and an additional $5 billion.

Putin said Monday the new department was needed "so that money is spent rationally and to prevent embezzlement of government resources," according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Putin said the money spent on the games should benefit all of southern Russia, a vast and impoverished region that includes the troubled North Caucasus where Chechnya is located.

"We have a good pretext to develop southern Russia," Putin was quoted as saying.

Corruption has flourished in Russia since czarist times but has markedly increased in recent years under Putin, watchdogs say. The global anti-corruption group Transparency International estimates graft has jumped as much as sevenfold since 2001.

Russia is near the top of Transparency International's scale of corruption, at No. 121 out of 163 in 2006, along with such countries as Rwanda and Burundi. Five years ago, it was rated No. 71.

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