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Monday, November 3, 2014
CEO Went Against the Petrodollar and Dies a Mysterious Death. Who Holds a Monopoly on the Truth?
The World of Energy
by Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategistl
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Last month in these pages, I wrote:
Patrick de la Chevardière, CFO of Total SA (which is France’s largest energy company), has publicly announced that Total is looking to finance its share in the $27-billion Yamal LNG project using euros, yuan, Russian rubles, and any other currency but US dollars.
“The effect of US sanctions was that Yamal LNG will be prevented from raising any dollar financings,” Patrick de la Chevardière stated in London at a news briefing.
Patrick de la Chevardière’s boss was Total SA CEO Christophe de Margerie. De Margerie is now dead: he died under mysterious conditions last week, when just after midnight a snowplow and his private jet collided at a Moscow airport.
Back in university (yes, over 18 years ago now), I actually worked at the Vancouver International Airport. Because I was a young buck going to university, I got the night shift: I was responsible for bringing planes into the bays, where passengers unload and the plane gets refueled.
One has better odds of being struck by lightning at an airport than being hit by a snowplow—or any other ground support.
Is it a coincidence that the one CEO who went against the petrodollar is now dead?
To understand the consequences of being on the wrong side of the Colder War, you really need to read my new book.
Maybe Christophe de Margerie had a falling out with Putin… As I wrote last month, his company is part of the charge to kill the petrodollar… but perhaps something happened behind closed doors.
In my book, part of a chapter focuses on “mysterious deaths” and how they’re linked to being on the wrong side of the political equation. Whether it’s going against Putin or against the petrodollar, there are many who have fallen on both sides.
But back to de Margerie and Total.
Total has yet to complete the financing. Did de Margerie fail to deliver what he promised to Putin—which was that he would invest $27 billion into the Russian Yamal LNG plant? Did the EU28 prevent Total from closing the financing under pressure from the French government? De Margerie and French President François Hollande were close friends.
De Margerie was outspoken in his support for Putin’s agenda; he believed Russia was a good partner for Europe. While we don’t know for sure whose toes de Margerie stepped on, we know how this story ended last week.
If Total doesn’t close the $27 billion financing to move forward with the Yamal LNG project, then we will know that the powers that be (whether French government, EU28, or the US) stepped in to prevent an attack on the petrodollar.
The world is turning its back on the US Under Obama
As an American, you may not like what I’m going to say, but it needs to be said: America is losing face internationally under President Obama’s leadership. Obama’s failed foreign policy was challenged publicly at the podium at the most recent 69th United Nations general assembly.
On September 27, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov started out his speech by challenging America’s undemocratic actions of late, stating:
The US-led Western alliance that portrays itself as a champion of democracy, the rule of law and human rights within individual countries, acts from a completely opposite position in the international arena, rejecting the democratic principle of the sovereign equality of states enshrined in the UN Charter and tries to decide for everyone what is good or bad.
Lavrov uses the election in Crimea as an example, stating:
“It was precisely the aggressive assault on these rights that compelled the population of Crimea to take its destiny in its own hands and make a choice in favor of self-determination. This was an absolutely free choice no matter what has been invented by those who were, in the first place, primarily responsible for the internal conflict in Ukraine.
The attempts to distort the truth and to hide the facts behind blanket accusations have been undertaken at all stages of the Ukrainian crisis.
The vast majority of North America has a strong bias against Russia or any election results involving the Eastern blocs and specifically Russia. When I bring up the fact in any media interview that the takeover of Crimea by Russia was the result of a free election, my interviewers immediately dismisses that election as a fraud. They state that it was staged and fixed and ignore the data. The fact is that the vast majority of the population of Crimea are Russians who speak Russian and who see themselves as Russian… so it makes total sense that they freely voted to join Russia instead of wanting to be under the rule of an unfriendly regime in Kiev.
Many years ago, a well-known media personality was involved in the promotion of a company looking for an investment. He was pitching Doug Casey and me, and as Doug’s analyst I began to question the media personality regarding the details of his pitch. His only response to my very pointed questions was, “Look, kid, don’t let the details interfere with my story—it’s a good story.”
This is essentially what most of the Western media outlets are doing—distorting the facts so that they fit neatly into the story they want to tell.
But back to Lavrov’s speech at the UN; he also called out the US for its failed foreign policy by stating (emphasis mine):
Washington has openly declared its right to the unilateral use of military force anywhere to advance its own interests. Military interference has become common, even despite the dismal outcome of the use of power that the US has carried out over recent years.
The sustainability of the international system has been severely shaken by NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia, intervention in Iraq, the attack against Libya and the failure of the operation in Afghanistan.
Lavrov is speaking from experience. When Obama openly declared, “We are drawing a red line” regarding Syria in 2013, it was Lavrov who threw out a lifeline for our president, suggesting that Russia should work with the US to get rid of the sarin gas and other WMDs, rather than invading against the wishes of Congress and the American people.
I am not at all sympathetic to the Russian cause, but rather look at the facts, the data, and more important, the actual events to form my opinion. The harsh reality is that Obama, as much as the Western media will deny it, is comparable to the Wizard of Oz. The current US president is a confused and weak leader hiding behind a curtain: the American flag.
Russia is standing up to Obama and his failed foreign geopolitical policies. Unfortunately for us, the rest of the world is taking notice.
It would be nice if the Western media would remember that nobody has a monopoly on the truth.
The Colder War will provide all the details
Hard copies of my book are available on Nov 10, but it is available now on Amazon kindle, and my book has already cracked Best Seller status in the following categories on Amazon:
Best Seller: Oil and Energy Industry
Best Seller: Public Policy
Best Seller: Commodities Trading
Best Seller: Physics of Energy
My book covers many aspects of the geopolitics of energy… especially the struggle between Russia and the US. Some influential people have endorsed my book, such as former Congressman Dr. Ron Paul, who noted:
The Colder War provides a reversing contrast from the hysterical “Putin is Stalin, Jr., restart the Cold War” message emanating from the neocon think tanks and the mainstream media. Marin Katusa shows the real threat to the American people …
You see, while America and the West weren’t looking, Vladimir Putin has orchestrated a takeover of the energy sector. Putin has transformed Russia from a crumbling former Soviet state into an energy powerhouse. Russia is quickly becoming the only source of energy for countries desperate to secure long-term supplies—this gives Putin more power and more leverage than ever before, and the West has yet to recognize this threat.
Europe, Africa, and China are all dependent on Russian energy. Putin won’t stop until he takes down the only thing holding Russia from turning into a superpower: the US.
Inside my book, you’ll discover how Putin is working to break the monopoly of the US dollar in the global energy trade. He has set in motion an ingenious and devastating plan to do it.
If Putin is successful, he could nuke the US economy and cost the average American dearly.
Do you think the recent pullback in oil prices will cripple Putin? If you said yes, you’re wrong… and you really need to read my book.
Friends and colleagues have told me that when they sat down to read it, they could not put it down and had to finish it; it was fast paced and easy to digest.
Once you read it, your view of the world and the global markets will never be the same.
You might even want to call your broker the next morning—because the US has never been more vulnerable, and the stakes have never been higher.
Preorder your copy of The Colder War and make sure you’re among the first to read this important book, so that you can start to separate partisan politics from the truth in this increasingly important geopolitical chess match.
Preorder The Colder War Now
by Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategistl
facebook twitter google+Last month in these pages, I wrote:
Patrick de la Chevardière, CFO of Total SA (which is France’s largest energy company), has publicly announced that Total is looking to finance its share in the $27-billion Yamal LNG project using euros, yuan, Russian rubles, and any other currency but US dollars.
“The effect of US sanctions was that Yamal LNG will be prevented from raising any dollar financings,” Patrick de la Chevardière stated in London at a news briefing.
Patrick de la Chevardière’s boss was Total SA CEO Christophe de Margerie. De Margerie is now dead: he died under mysterious conditions last week, when just after midnight a snowplow and his private jet collided at a Moscow airport.
Back in university (yes, over 18 years ago now), I actually worked at the Vancouver International Airport. Because I was a young buck going to university, I got the night shift: I was responsible for bringing planes into the bays, where passengers unload and the plane gets refueled.
One has better odds of being struck by lightning at an airport than being hit by a snowplow—or any other ground support.
Is it a coincidence that the one CEO who went against the petrodollar is now dead?
To understand the consequences of being on the wrong side of the Colder War, you really need to read my new book.
Maybe Christophe de Margerie had a falling out with Putin… As I wrote last month, his company is part of the charge to kill the petrodollar… but perhaps something happened behind closed doors.
In my book, part of a chapter focuses on “mysterious deaths” and how they’re linked to being on the wrong side of the political equation. Whether it’s going against Putin or against the petrodollar, there are many who have fallen on both sides.
But back to de Margerie and Total.
Total has yet to complete the financing. Did de Margerie fail to deliver what he promised to Putin—which was that he would invest $27 billion into the Russian Yamal LNG plant? Did the EU28 prevent Total from closing the financing under pressure from the French government? De Margerie and French President François Hollande were close friends.
De Margerie was outspoken in his support for Putin’s agenda; he believed Russia was a good partner for Europe. While we don’t know for sure whose toes de Margerie stepped on, we know how this story ended last week.
If Total doesn’t close the $27 billion financing to move forward with the Yamal LNG project, then we will know that the powers that be (whether French government, EU28, or the US) stepped in to prevent an attack on the petrodollar.
The world is turning its back on the US Under Obama
As an American, you may not like what I’m going to say, but it needs to be said: America is losing face internationally under President Obama’s leadership. Obama’s failed foreign policy was challenged publicly at the podium at the most recent 69th United Nations general assembly.
On September 27, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov started out his speech by challenging America’s undemocratic actions of late, stating:
The US-led Western alliance that portrays itself as a champion of democracy, the rule of law and human rights within individual countries, acts from a completely opposite position in the international arena, rejecting the democratic principle of the sovereign equality of states enshrined in the UN Charter and tries to decide for everyone what is good or bad.
Lavrov uses the election in Crimea as an example, stating:
“It was precisely the aggressive assault on these rights that compelled the population of Crimea to take its destiny in its own hands and make a choice in favor of self-determination. This was an absolutely free choice no matter what has been invented by those who were, in the first place, primarily responsible for the internal conflict in Ukraine.
The attempts to distort the truth and to hide the facts behind blanket accusations have been undertaken at all stages of the Ukrainian crisis.
The vast majority of North America has a strong bias against Russia or any election results involving the Eastern blocs and specifically Russia. When I bring up the fact in any media interview that the takeover of Crimea by Russia was the result of a free election, my interviewers immediately dismisses that election as a fraud. They state that it was staged and fixed and ignore the data. The fact is that the vast majority of the population of Crimea are Russians who speak Russian and who see themselves as Russian… so it makes total sense that they freely voted to join Russia instead of wanting to be under the rule of an unfriendly regime in Kiev.
Many years ago, a well-known media personality was involved in the promotion of a company looking for an investment. He was pitching Doug Casey and me, and as Doug’s analyst I began to question the media personality regarding the details of his pitch. His only response to my very pointed questions was, “Look, kid, don’t let the details interfere with my story—it’s a good story.”
This is essentially what most of the Western media outlets are doing—distorting the facts so that they fit neatly into the story they want to tell.
But back to Lavrov’s speech at the UN; he also called out the US for its failed foreign policy by stating (emphasis mine):
Washington has openly declared its right to the unilateral use of military force anywhere to advance its own interests. Military interference has become common, even despite the dismal outcome of the use of power that the US has carried out over recent years.
The sustainability of the international system has been severely shaken by NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia, intervention in Iraq, the attack against Libya and the failure of the operation in Afghanistan.
Lavrov is speaking from experience. When Obama openly declared, “We are drawing a red line” regarding Syria in 2013, it was Lavrov who threw out a lifeline for our president, suggesting that Russia should work with the US to get rid of the sarin gas and other WMDs, rather than invading against the wishes of Congress and the American people.
I am not at all sympathetic to the Russian cause, but rather look at the facts, the data, and more important, the actual events to form my opinion. The harsh reality is that Obama, as much as the Western media will deny it, is comparable to the Wizard of Oz. The current US president is a confused and weak leader hiding behind a curtain: the American flag.
Russia is standing up to Obama and his failed foreign geopolitical policies. Unfortunately for us, the rest of the world is taking notice.
It would be nice if the Western media would remember that nobody has a monopoly on the truth.
The Colder War will provide all the details
Hard copies of my book are available on Nov 10, but it is available now on Amazon kindle, and my book has already cracked Best Seller status in the following categories on Amazon:
Best Seller: Oil and Energy Industry
Best Seller: Public Policy
Best Seller: Commodities Trading
Best Seller: Physics of Energy
My book covers many aspects of the geopolitics of energy… especially the struggle between Russia and the US. Some influential people have endorsed my book, such as former Congressman Dr. Ron Paul, who noted:
The Colder War provides a reversing contrast from the hysterical “Putin is Stalin, Jr., restart the Cold War” message emanating from the neocon think tanks and the mainstream media. Marin Katusa shows the real threat to the American people …
You see, while America and the West weren’t looking, Vladimir Putin has orchestrated a takeover of the energy sector. Putin has transformed Russia from a crumbling former Soviet state into an energy powerhouse. Russia is quickly becoming the only source of energy for countries desperate to secure long-term supplies—this gives Putin more power and more leverage than ever before, and the West has yet to recognize this threat.
Europe, Africa, and China are all dependent on Russian energy. Putin won’t stop until he takes down the only thing holding Russia from turning into a superpower: the US.
Inside my book, you’ll discover how Putin is working to break the monopoly of the US dollar in the global energy trade. He has set in motion an ingenious and devastating plan to do it.
If Putin is successful, he could nuke the US economy and cost the average American dearly.
Do you think the recent pullback in oil prices will cripple Putin? If you said yes, you’re wrong… and you really need to read my book.
Friends and colleagues have told me that when they sat down to read it, they could not put it down and had to finish it; it was fast paced and easy to digest.
Once you read it, your view of the world and the global markets will never be the same.
You might even want to call your broker the next morning—because the US has never been more vulnerable, and the stakes have never been higher.
Preorder your copy of The Colder War and make sure you’re among the first to read this important book, so that you can start to separate partisan politics from the truth in this increasingly important geopolitical chess match.
Preorder The Colder War Now
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Ready for landing: Mexico City airport expansion could make it one of largest in world
By Tim Johnson, McClatchy, September 3, 2014
MEXICO CITY—President Enrique Peña Nieto announced plans Tuesday to build a new airport in Mexico City that can handle four times the traffic of the existing one, the second busiest in Latin America.
The new airport will have six runways and is projected to cost $9.1 billion.
President Peña Nieto said the airport “will be the biggest infrastructure project in our country in many years and even one of the biggest in the world.”
It will be built on vacant federal land to the east of Benito Juarez International Airport, which handled about 31.5 million passengers last year.
Peña Nieto, in a 90-minute annual address to the nation, said Mexico couldn’t keep “postponing a solution” to the overcrowding at the capital airport, which regularly exceeds its operating capacity.
The bottlenecks at the airport “restrict movement around the country, limit Mexico’s ties to the world, put a brake on trade and investment, and create delays for users,” Peña Nieto said.
When engineers finished work on the existing airport in 1952, the capital had only 3 million residents. Since then, the metropolis has swollen to more than 20 million inhabitants, partially engulfing the airport, which occupies a dry lake bed.
A second terminal was added in 2007, but only two runways serve both terminals and they can’t be used simultaneously. The airport, which is Latin America’s second busiest, after Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport, has surpassed the 340,000 annual takeoffs and landings experts say it’s capable of handling, hitting 389,226 last year.
That means aircraft take off and land at a pace of nearly one per minute during peak periods. The airport is less than three miles from the capital’s main square, and the standard landing approach has jetliners skimming over the city.
An annual report given by Peña Nieto’s government to Congress on Monday didn’t say how long it would take to build the new airport, which will arise on some 12,500 acres of mostly vacant land around the largely dry Lake Texcoco that’s contiguous to the current facility. [The new airport will be near the site where the Mexican government attempted to build a new airport in 2002. It failed after local farmers, wielding machetes, launched protests over the expropriation of their land for the new airport.]
Once built out to a capacity of 120 million passengers a year, the new airport could be one of the largest in the world, depending on the pace of growth at busy airports in places such as Chicago, Dubai, Beijing and Atlanta. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world’s busiest, handled 94.4 million passengers last year.
The Mexico City airport handles a third of air passengers in Mexico and more than half of all airfreight.
MEXICO CITY—President Enrique Peña Nieto announced plans Tuesday to build a new airport in Mexico City that can handle four times the traffic of the existing one, the second busiest in Latin America.
The new airport will have six runways and is projected to cost $9.1 billion.
President Peña Nieto said the airport “will be the biggest infrastructure project in our country in many years and even one of the biggest in the world.”
It will be built on vacant federal land to the east of Benito Juarez International Airport, which handled about 31.5 million passengers last year.
Peña Nieto, in a 90-minute annual address to the nation, said Mexico couldn’t keep “postponing a solution” to the overcrowding at the capital airport, which regularly exceeds its operating capacity.
The bottlenecks at the airport “restrict movement around the country, limit Mexico’s ties to the world, put a brake on trade and investment, and create delays for users,” Peña Nieto said.
When engineers finished work on the existing airport in 1952, the capital had only 3 million residents. Since then, the metropolis has swollen to more than 20 million inhabitants, partially engulfing the airport, which occupies a dry lake bed.
A second terminal was added in 2007, but only two runways serve both terminals and they can’t be used simultaneously. The airport, which is Latin America’s second busiest, after Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport, has surpassed the 340,000 annual takeoffs and landings experts say it’s capable of handling, hitting 389,226 last year.
That means aircraft take off and land at a pace of nearly one per minute during peak periods. The airport is less than three miles from the capital’s main square, and the standard landing approach has jetliners skimming over the city.
An annual report given by Peña Nieto’s government to Congress on Monday didn’t say how long it would take to build the new airport, which will arise on some 12,500 acres of mostly vacant land around the largely dry Lake Texcoco that’s contiguous to the current facility. [The new airport will be near the site where the Mexican government attempted to build a new airport in 2002. It failed after local farmers, wielding machetes, launched protests over the expropriation of their land for the new airport.]
Once built out to a capacity of 120 million passengers a year, the new airport could be one of the largest in the world, depending on the pace of growth at busy airports in places such as Chicago, Dubai, Beijing and Atlanta. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world’s busiest, handled 94.4 million passengers last year.
The Mexico City airport handles a third of air passengers in Mexico and more than half of all airfreight.
Friday, August 15, 2014
Athens Olympics leave mixed legacy, 10 years later
By Nicholas Paphitis And Theodora Tongas, AP, Aug 13, 2014
ATHENS, Greece (AP)—In an obscure corner of a park sits a forlorn reminder that, 10 years ago, Athens hosted the 2004 Summer Olympics. The crumbling miniature theater is inscribed with the words “glory, wealth, wisdom, victory, triumph, hero, labor”—and it is where visiting Olympic officials planted an olive sapling that would bear their names for posterity.
Once a symbol of pomp, the marble theater is now an emblem of pointless waste in a venture that left a mixed legacy: a brand-new subway, airport and other vital infrastructure that significantly improved everyday life in a city of 4 million, set against scores of decrepit sports venues built in a mad rush to meet deadlines—with little thought for post-Olympic use.
As Greece groans under a cruel economic depression, questions linger of whether the Athens Games were too ambitious an undertaking for a weak economy. While economists agree it would be unfair to blame the meltdown on the 17-day Games, the post-Olympic era is seen as a decade of lost opportunities—including failure to significantly boost the country’s sporting culture. It’s a lesson to which Brazil may pay heed, as it races to complete projects ahead of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
“We didn’t take advantage of this dynamic that we got in 2004,” said former Olympic weightlifting champion Pyrros Dimas, a Greek sporting hero turned Socialist member of Parliament. “We simply made the biggest mistake in our history: We switched off, locked up the stadiums, let them fall to pieces, and everything finished there.”
“We spent a lot of money for some projects (that) are shut and rotting,” said Dimas, who won his last Olympic medal in an Athens arena now reinvented as a lecture and conference venue. “There were projects that should have cost 2 and 3 million (euros) and suddenly became so big that they cost 13 and 14 million. There was no control.”
The latest government estimate sets the final cost of the Games at 8.5 billion euros, double the original budget but a drop in the ocean of the country’s subsequent 320 billion-euro debt, which spun out of control after 2008. Former organizing committee chief Gianna Angelopoulos has commissioned the first independent survey of the Olympics’ overall economic effect. It will aim to weigh Olympic overspend and waste against a possible boost to the crucial tourism industry—arrivals have almost doubled since 2004, from 11.7 to 20.1 million—foreign investment and employment.
“The Olympics were very important in increasing the brand awareness … of Greece,” said economist Theodore Krintas, managing director of Attica Wealth Management. “But we did, very, very limited things on a follow-up basis.”
Andrew Zimbalist, a U.S. economist who studies the financial impact of major sporting events, said past experience shows that hosting the Olympics does not generally promote economic development: “At the end of the day, the main benefit to be had seems to be a feel-good experience that the people in the host city or the host country have,” said Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College. “But that’s a fleeting experience, not something that endures.
“Why couldn’t Athens have simply invested … in development and transportation and communications and infrastructure, and not hosted the Olympics?”
In Greece, few of the sporting venues—mostly purpose-built permanent structures—have seen regular post-Olympic use. The badminton venue is a successful concert hall, but the empty table-tennis and gymnastics stadium is up for sale, and the beach volleyball center has been rarely used and was recently looted.
Most venues are padlocked.
The seaside site of Athens’ old airport hosted half a dozen venues. Politicians have dithered for a decade over how to use the sprawling plot—meaning facilities have simply been left to rot. Lengths of large tubing lie near abandoned runways. Decommissioned jumbo jets sit near where planners once dreamed of building a water amusement park.
Greek Olympic Committee head Spyros Capralos, a senior member of the 2004 organizing committee, said the state of the sporting venues “puts our country to shame.” The former swimming champion and two-time Olympic water polo competitor blames bureaucracy and lack of foresight.
“Nobody was thinking what would happen the next day,” he said. “Many of the sports facilities were constructed just to be constructed … and nobody thought that they required a lot of money for maintenance after the Olympic Games.”
Overall, Capralos insisted, the Games were a boost for Greece, mainly due to non-sports infrastructure pegged to the Games that otherwise might never have materialized.
Capralos believes the legacy of the stadiums can still be salvaged.
“Simply, someone must do whatever is needed for the venues to be taken over by the private sector—because I don’t think the state can be a very good entrepreneur or venue manager.”
ATHENS, Greece (AP)—In an obscure corner of a park sits a forlorn reminder that, 10 years ago, Athens hosted the 2004 Summer Olympics. The crumbling miniature theater is inscribed with the words “glory, wealth, wisdom, victory, triumph, hero, labor”—and it is where visiting Olympic officials planted an olive sapling that would bear their names for posterity.
Once a symbol of pomp, the marble theater is now an emblem of pointless waste in a venture that left a mixed legacy: a brand-new subway, airport and other vital infrastructure that significantly improved everyday life in a city of 4 million, set against scores of decrepit sports venues built in a mad rush to meet deadlines—with little thought for post-Olympic use.
As Greece groans under a cruel economic depression, questions linger of whether the Athens Games were too ambitious an undertaking for a weak economy. While economists agree it would be unfair to blame the meltdown on the 17-day Games, the post-Olympic era is seen as a decade of lost opportunities—including failure to significantly boost the country’s sporting culture. It’s a lesson to which Brazil may pay heed, as it races to complete projects ahead of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
“We didn’t take advantage of this dynamic that we got in 2004,” said former Olympic weightlifting champion Pyrros Dimas, a Greek sporting hero turned Socialist member of Parliament. “We simply made the biggest mistake in our history: We switched off, locked up the stadiums, let them fall to pieces, and everything finished there.”
“We spent a lot of money for some projects (that) are shut and rotting,” said Dimas, who won his last Olympic medal in an Athens arena now reinvented as a lecture and conference venue. “There were projects that should have cost 2 and 3 million (euros) and suddenly became so big that they cost 13 and 14 million. There was no control.”
The latest government estimate sets the final cost of the Games at 8.5 billion euros, double the original budget but a drop in the ocean of the country’s subsequent 320 billion-euro debt, which spun out of control after 2008. Former organizing committee chief Gianna Angelopoulos has commissioned the first independent survey of the Olympics’ overall economic effect. It will aim to weigh Olympic overspend and waste against a possible boost to the crucial tourism industry—arrivals have almost doubled since 2004, from 11.7 to 20.1 million—foreign investment and employment.
“The Olympics were very important in increasing the brand awareness … of Greece,” said economist Theodore Krintas, managing director of Attica Wealth Management. “But we did, very, very limited things on a follow-up basis.”
Andrew Zimbalist, a U.S. economist who studies the financial impact of major sporting events, said past experience shows that hosting the Olympics does not generally promote economic development: “At the end of the day, the main benefit to be had seems to be a feel-good experience that the people in the host city or the host country have,” said Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College. “But that’s a fleeting experience, not something that endures.
“Why couldn’t Athens have simply invested … in development and transportation and communications and infrastructure, and not hosted the Olympics?”
In Greece, few of the sporting venues—mostly purpose-built permanent structures—have seen regular post-Olympic use. The badminton venue is a successful concert hall, but the empty table-tennis and gymnastics stadium is up for sale, and the beach volleyball center has been rarely used and was recently looted.
Most venues are padlocked.
The seaside site of Athens’ old airport hosted half a dozen venues. Politicians have dithered for a decade over how to use the sprawling plot—meaning facilities have simply been left to rot. Lengths of large tubing lie near abandoned runways. Decommissioned jumbo jets sit near where planners once dreamed of building a water amusement park.
Greek Olympic Committee head Spyros Capralos, a senior member of the 2004 organizing committee, said the state of the sporting venues “puts our country to shame.” The former swimming champion and two-time Olympic water polo competitor blames bureaucracy and lack of foresight.
“Nobody was thinking what would happen the next day,” he said. “Many of the sports facilities were constructed just to be constructed … and nobody thought that they required a lot of money for maintenance after the Olympic Games.”
Overall, Capralos insisted, the Games were a boost for Greece, mainly due to non-sports infrastructure pegged to the Games that otherwise might never have materialized.
Capralos believes the legacy of the stadiums can still be salvaged.
“Simply, someone must do whatever is needed for the venues to be taken over by the private sector—because I don’t think the state can be a very good entrepreneur or venue manager.”
