Any other business: The friends of Putin taking home gold from the Sochi Olympics

Imagine if the BBC’s excitable commentators had been asked to cover the building of Sochi’s facilities, rather than the Winter Olympics themselves. ‘Yeesss!!’ Ed Leigh might have yelled, ‘That’s the 21st construction contract for the big lad from St Petersburg, Arkady Rotenberg. Seven point four billion dollars’ worth, a new Olympic record — more than the entire cost of the 2010 Vancouver Games! How cool is that for the 62-year-old who was Vladimir Putin’s boyhood judo partner? Up next, the $9.4 billion rail-and-highway link between Olympic sites: keep your eye on Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin, who used to be the President’s dacha neighbour…’

And so on through a roll call of Russian businessmen who have collected gold in Sochi, where the total cost of Olympic-related works is said to have passed $51 billion. Putin has personally driven the project, and when he fired one Olympic official — whose brother had the contract to build the ski jump — he declared: ‘The main issue is to be sure nobody steals anything.’ Allies claim he has made strenuous efforts in that respect, highlighting that as of last year Russia’s budget watchdog had identified a mere half-billion ‘misspent’ in Sochi. But opponents claim much larger sums have been siphoned off to favoured tycoons, and cast all sorts of aspersions on Putin himself. One campaigner, Alexei Navalny, described the Games as ‘a monument to embezzlement’.

Who to believe? Chatham House research fellow Andrew Monaghan warns that sleaze allegations are all too freely bandied between Russian political foes, and points out that a nationwide anti-corruption drive has been central to Putin’s policy agenda. Nevertheless, he writes, ‘corruption sits on the heart of the Russian body politic’.

Combined with Putin’s anti-gay stance, all this raises the issue of whether great sporting events should ever be awarded to regimes that fail basic tests of probity and human rights.