Olympic financial problems

An apparent exclusive from the Times: a team from KPMG have been called in to investigate a £100m hole in the 2012 Olympics finances of the London Development Agency. £100m that the LDA should have set aside to compensate the businesses forced out of the Olympic site in Stratford – and the KPMG team are there to work out whether this was “genuine oversight” or “a cover-up that could amount to reckless use of taxpayers’ money”. Either way, it’s incompetence or deception, and neither should really be allowed in a project as high-stakes as holding the Olympics: and this £100m hole has left the LDA with a severe cashflow problem which may well cause other infrastructure projects to be held up or cancelled altogether.

Taking a step back, though, can anyone seriously claim they didn’t see this coming when London won the Olympic bid back in 2005? When has anything in the UK ever gone smoothly and without political/financial hitches – or, for that matter, come in at or below the predicted cost?! In the words of The Hives, “Hate to Say I Told You So” – which incidentally was, I believe, the theme used by the BBC coverage of the Athens Olympics in 2004:

~ by Marius Ostrowski on June 24, 2009.