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Saturday, February 02, 2013

Russia to spend more than $50 billion on Sochi by 2014

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will spend more than $50 billion (31 billion pounds) on preparation and staging the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak said on Friday.

As of January 1, 2013, Russia had already spent nearly 1.136 trillion roubles ($37.85 billion), Kozak told reporters following a meeting of the state commission on Sochi in the government headquarters in Moscow.

"Of that sum, 737 billion roubles ($24.55 billion) had come from private investors and the rest from the federal budget," Kozak, appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin to head the Sochi preparations, said.

The total expenditure will be 1.526 trillion roubles ($51.08 billion), he added.

The latest figure is almost five time more than the original estimate, which was done shortly after the Black Sea resort was awarded the 2014 Games in July 2007 as Sochi needed to build most of the sports venues and infrastructure from scratch.

(Reporting by Gennady Fyodorov, editing by Pritha Sarkar)

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