By Vestnik Kavkaza
Summing up results of the last year and stating on plans for this year, the head of the Russian Audit Chamber spoke on the protection of the domestic market from genetically modified products: “Russia has an advantage that we are required to use. We are able to produce an environmentally-friendly product. Unfortunately, we have in our country supporters of the expansion of this market. We have decided to examine this topic separately. It will be very hard work, because the people behind this issue have huge billions, including in the West, in the United States.” Moreover, this year the Chamber will inspect the theme of the children who are orphaned and budgetary allocations, as well as secondary education.
Speaking about the former head of the Russian Football Union, Sergey Fursenko, Stepashin said that no violations were registered: “We did not specifically advertise the check of the RFU. I can say one thing: Sergei Fursenko has not stolen anything, and he should not worry.” The Chamber presented to Tolstykh the whole system's financial activities. According to Stepashin, “there are a huge number of inconsistencies, unclear funding, lack of internal controls. We must restore order in the Football Union, as in any social organization, but it must be clearly understood: no budget money should go there. There should be serious sponsorship contracts. We need to find common ground with those who lead the Premier League today, will we not go away from this.We do not have laws on agency activities, but there are so-called regulatory documents, the internal document of the RFU. Most of all, our claims are related to it because it is unclear where the money is from, who pays tax, how much they actually receive, and the saddest thing - they corrupt the young people, not all but most of them. They start coming into the family to guide this teenager, telling him about the possibility of gaining a lot of money, and when the family is trying to break the contract, and the father or mother defends the child, they must pay a penalty of €500 million. No country in the world has such conditions. This is one of the most serious problems.”
As for the transfer market, Stepashin predicted: “If we continue to pay huge amounts of money for something vague, we will have no one to play football for us. We reported on this too and asked the RFU and Vitaly Mutko to think about serious legislative support. One topic has already been solved - you know, I wrote a letter to Putin, when he was still Prime Minister, about match-fixing, amendments were made to the legislation, and now, even though the law enforcement bodies do not want to deal with the participants of these matches, they have to do it. Incidentally, Nikolai Tolstykh has replaced the group of Kavazashvili, which allegedly monitored match-fixing, not having seen any of them, with a special group comprising representatives of all law enforcement agencies - the Federal Security Service, Interior Ministry, General Prosecutor's Office and Investigative Committee that will work according to specific signals, as is done in Italy, in Turkey, in other countries, in Britain, as you know. So we will deal with this field.”
Regarding the Olympic Games 2014, Sergei Stepashin said: “We will hold the Olympics on time. The opening of the Olympics will be the most beautiful in the world, even more beautiful than the fireworks during the APEC summit. The Olympics is quite pricey. But I would divide it into two parts. Actually, sports facilities cost about as much as in Europe, given the mountains, the environment, traffic, everything is considered, and we check it quarterly. We are constantly working with Dmitry Kozak, so now it is almost impossible to steal anything, I promise you this. Why has this become more expensive? This is not due to sports facilities and infrastructure. For the first time, probably - even under Stalin we did not have this, with all due respect to him by the Communists – for the first time in 2.5 years we have built 27 up-scale European-class tunnels in the mountains. Can you imagine this? 27 tunnels, over 60 km, and these are not just holes. Of course, this required a lot of money. Then we faced landslides, etc. So, of course, this is a unique project in terms of infrastructure, but we are concerned today about one topic, and now Dmitry Kozak and I are preparing proposals to the President - Vladimir Vladimirovich, you know, he personally oversees the Olympics, and rightly so. This is a topic of the post-Olympic legacy: what will be after the Olympics, who will run the facilities, how much it will cost, how to make sure that they are operated, and how to make sure that at least to some extent they pay for themselves. By the way, no Olympic venue in the world, we specifically analysed not only winter but summer Olympics, has become self-sustaining. In Turin, you may remember, when Italy hosted the Winter Olympics, all the Olympic facilities were demolished. In China, half of the sites were destroyed, half are used completely not for sports. We will not follow this road. But we need to decide who will pay for the facilities. According to our calculations, for the maintenance of Olympic facilities after the Games we will need to spend about 60 billion rubles per year. This is expensive. Therefore it is necessary to consider the commercial component. This program may be not peculiar to the Accounting Chamber, although its subject is the efficiency of the budget, whether it's the Krasnodar budget or the federal budget. Perhaps for us today this is the number one topic. Well, topic number three is that we have to win the Olympic Games, because if we do not win, Vitaly Mutko will probably have to jump from a springboard.”
