Brasilia’s World Cup stadium is the second-most expensive in the world. (Eraldo Peres/AP)
This is not a feel-good story. With just more than a month until the World Cup kicks off in Brazil,
the Associated Press came out with a scathing report today outlining the outsize corruption and skyrocketing costs that have marred the country’s preparations. Here are the five saddest and most shocking things we learned:
1) One of the priciest stadiums in the world has a dim future. The Mane Garrincha World Cup stadium in Brasilia, a city of roughly 2.5 million people, cost about $900 million in public funds to build, which makes it the second-most expensive soccer stadium ever. (The first is England’s Wembley Stadium at $1.25 billion.) The budget was supposed to be $300 million, but alleged fraud tripled it, the AP reports. Perhaps it’s an investment for Brasilia’s hometown team? Nope. Brasilia doesn’t have a major professional soccer team.
2) The price discrepancies are laughably ridiculous. An auditor’s report allotted $4,700 to cover the costs of transportation of prefabricated grandstands to Brasilia’s stadium. But the construction consortium charged the government $1.5 million, the AP reports. That’s a 318 times the original cost. Or, in wackier terms, a 31,000 percent mark-up.
3) Politicians and politics have a lot to do with the problems. Andrade Gutierrez, the construction conglomerate that’s been awarded stakes in contracts that total about one-fourth of the World Cup’s $11.5 billion price tag, contributed $73,180 to 2008′s municipal elections, the AP reports. In 2012, after it was known which cities would host the World Cup, the company’s political contributions soared to $37.1 million. That’s a 50,000 percent increase.
It had, it turns out, been too good to be true. After a positive start to the year, Brazil’s industrial production fell by 0.5 per cent in March from February and by 0.9 per cent in comparison with March 2013,