Greece: The cost of this summer's Athens Olympics was nearly €9 billion, almost double the amount forecast just a year before the Games, Greece's Finance Minister said yesterday.
"The cost of the Games is expected to reach €8.95 billion," Mr George Alogoskoufis told reporters after meeting Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis. He said while not all figures were final the state paid the lion's share of the bill, or about €7.2 billion.
The figure means the Greek Games cost far more than their 2000 predecessor in Sydney, Australia, where spending ran $140 million over the budgeted $2.6 billion.
Mr Alogoskoufis said the total also included the balanced €1.7 billion budget of the Games' organisers but did not include the cost of other infrastructure projects completed before the Games.
"This does not include the construction cost of projects completed or speeded up to be ready in time for the Games," he said, referring to the capital's three-year-old airport, a major ring road and a new tram line.
The International Olympic Committee, though, considered both the tram and the ring-road as crucial Games projects and repeatedly urged organisers to speed up work.
The former socialist government, which lost elections five months before the August Games to Mr Alogoskoufis's conservative New Democracy party, had insisted earlier this year the cost would not significantly exceed €4.6 billion excluding the budget of the organisers.
But years of delays in construction and a huge rise in the security budget dramatically inflated the cost. As an example of the spiralling costs, the security budget for the first Games since the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the US rose from a projected $125 million in the 1997 bidding file to over $1.2 billion.
Years of double and triple construction shifts to catch up with schedules further hiked costs.
Mr Alogoskoufis said Olympic infrastructure projects cost €2.8 billion, Olympic sports venues and equipment another €2.1 billion, security stood at €1 billion while athletes' hospitality and environmental projects set organisers back another €1.1 billion.