Where the accountants who put together the finances for the London Olympics liars or criminally incompetent?

Answer 1

Yes.

Probably the same set who did the Millenium Dome and Follyrood.

Answer 2

It's a moving target for this sort of project once the press get hold of it. There probably have been several plan changes since the original bid which will cost money to resolve. The VAT bill was probably a nasty surprise. The Dome suffered the same problem when the press got hold of the exhibits at the Dome and there was an awful lot of hard work done by NMEC executives to try and fill it when certain original exhibitors pulled out due to the bad press. To set the record straight the Dome was only £485M as opposed to the £750M usually quoted, the rest went on the Millenium Festival which was a series of projects up and down the whole UK. The only amount of optimistic accountancy was basing the income on an unrealistic amount of daily visitors.There would have been more visitors if the press hadn't dissed it. I think Madrid etc were breathing sighs of relief when the UK "won" the Olympic bid. (Poisoned chalice more like).

Answer 3

What makes you think that Accountants had anything to do with it. It was Labour Ministers that made the first estimates. Lord Coe I believe has the major role, and I believe is responsible to an Olympic Committee 2012 for running the project. I am sure that the problem isn't strictly to do with numbers, but trying to define exactly what is required (extremely difficult) and to speculate what future costs might be. We are still at a very early stage. Isn't Hazel Blears, the Labour politician also heavily involved. It was she who forgot to add in the VAT of £1.25billion. The truth could be the opposite of what you claim, ie. it was Labour Ministers that got the initial estimates wrong, and it was probably the involvement of others that pointed out the shortcomings in the estimates.

Also, very large projects like this are almost always deliberately under-estimated for political reasons, to get them underway without early objections based on cost.

Another major problem with the way that the Public sector run large projects, in fact, the way they run everything, is that, they regard budgets as money to be spent rather than targets to be beaten. Shouldn't they decide what needs to be done to run an efficient olympics, and then cost it. Rather, than deciding how much money they have to spend. A crazy way of doing things. Anyway, common sense dictates that a permanent site should be established for the Olympics to avoid this (all inclusive PC) nonsense.

Answer 4

I think they were neither - they merely did what they were hired to do - and they were hired by the London campaign managers, who were assuming there would be a more supportive (in tax terms) law coming through parliament in 2006.

What should we do about it? I say, give the games to the third world - let each major country there host one of the sports - and put the London campaign managers in jail for 1 month and seize 90% of all their assets - we'd benefit a lot more from that, & so would the world.

Answer 5

If they were employed by this government they would ill-educated, illiterate and, as we've seen, incompetent.
Of course, how the chancellor could forget the little matter of VAT only goes to show that he is from the same office as the accountants, I suggest.

Answer 6

Just the usual in this country really.

I'd bet it hits £20 billion before they are done anyway.

Nothing is too good for a Labour government.

Answer 7

Tessa Jowel and Ken Livingstone say no more