Who'd have thought so?
It's hard to believe this, n'est-ce pas?
Olympic chiefs were accused of understating the true cost of the 2012 Games yesterday as it emerged that the bill for the aquatics centre was already four times higher than the original bid price.
The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) announced that the contract, which was awarded to Balfour Beatty, had risen from the 2005 price of £75 million to £303 million.
And this just doesn't ring true:
The figures come after soaring costs at most of the Olympic venues and have led to renewed fears that the £9.3 billion 2012 budget will be exceeded. Jack Lemley, the former chairman of the ODA, gave warning that the bill was now likely to be £20 billion and he claimed that Ken Livingstone and Tessa Jowell had been understating the true costs.I mean we all know that the Olympics is an example of superb financial management for which we will always be grateful and that every penny spent on it represents a superb investment for Londoners. Isn't that so?
How about a competition? We won't know the result until well after 2012, but there'll be a prize for the winner. You have to guess how much the bill will finally be.£20 billion? £25 billion? £18 billion. And the prize is very clever. The higher the winning pick, the larger the debt we will have to repay. It's clever, don't you think?