22 November 2006

It's just like signing a mortgage application form...

Would you trust this person to be in charge of a project costing billions of pounds? The Independent reports:
The budget of £2.375bn during the Olympic bid has increasingly been derided as a "fag packet" calculation and Ms Jowell was forced to concede that the current figure is more like £3.3bn.
It became clear that creative accounting by civil servants has resulted in a figure of £1bn-plus for regeneration of the Thames Gateway no longer being included in the overall Games figure - even though urban regeneration has hitherto been considered part and parcel of the Olympic project.
In front of the Select Committee of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Ms Jowell blamed rising costs on construction inflation, the doubling of steel prices and a revised figure for public transport links serving the Games site near Stratford, east London. Incredibly, the original bid figure did not include the £400m cost of hiring the international project management consortium CLM.
She admitted there were further "potential liabilities" in the cost of Olympic security, which some estimates put at £1bn; the extent of a contingency fund within the budget; and a VAT bill thought to be up to £250m not included in the original calculations.

No, neither do I.

No comments: