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Work on Ukraine crisis stadium stalls - Euro 2012 threatened
Kiev - Things are back to normal this week at Ukraine's 80,000-seat Olympic
Stadium, with its badly-needed overhaul at a full stop, and political
bigwigs once again accusing each other of ruining the former Soviet republic's
chances of hosting the Euro 2012 football championship.
Only four crew without tools, supervisors, or anything in particular to
do, could be seen on Wednesday moving about a partially-rubbled downtown
Kiev shopping centre which, Ukrainian football officials and UEFA executives
agree, must be torn down so that the adjacent Olympic Stadium can be upgraded
to modern safety standards.
Ukraine and Poland were named co-hosts for the prestigious competition
in April 2007, but during a visit to Kiev last week UEFA boss Michel Platini
made no bones about Ukraine's chances of getting sacked from the job "because
if there are no stadiums there can be no games."
Olympic Stadium is the scheduled site of the final game.
During Platini's meetings with Ukrainian footballing officials and even
President Viktor Yushchenko and Premier Yulia Tymoshenko, wrecking-ball
cranes were busily bashing the Troitsky shopping centre into smaller bits.
Yushchenko and Tymoshenko alike promised that the offending structure,
located only a few dozen metres from Olympic Stadium, would be torn down
to make the venue safe to evacuate per UEFA standards.
"We will do the possible and the impossible to host Euro 2012,"
Tymoshenko said. "We are dead serious about meeting our commitments."
But less than a week after Platini left, the assault by man and machines
on the Troitsky shopping centre's reinforced concrete and girders ground
to a sudden halt. Earth moving equipment was parked, the dozens of site
construction workers went home, and all the arcane domestic problems the
Ukrainians had told the UEFA boss were all ironed out, resurfaced quite
as nasty as before.
Tymoshenko, a populist politician with her eye on the presidency in the
2009 elections, unloaded a double-barreled blast of rhetoric, accusing
Kiev mayor Leonid Chernovetsky of ordering the construction crews home
so as to harm her reputation, while simultaneously assuring Channel 5
television viewers that "We will tear down the building, and Olympic
Stadium will be ready for Euro 2012."
"The structure (the half-built Troitsky shopping centre) was put
up illegally because Mayor (Leonid) Chernvetsky issued the construction
permit on a corrupt basis," claimed Tymoshenko, a former natural
gas magnate now popular for her campaign against government officials
on the take, and over-rich tycoons.
But Mayor Chernovetsky, recently re-elected to office on a "modern
and professional government" ticket, fired back within hours. The
Eugene Construction Company was, per the terms of a deal hammered out
between Tymoshenko and Chernovetsky prior to Platini's arrival, due compensation
from Tymoshenko's government - to wit some long-tern rental of some 8,000
hectares of prime land on Kiev's outskirts in exchange for abandoning
the Troitsky shopping centre project.
"Ms. Tymoshenko has failed to sign the order transfering the land
(to the Eugene Company)," Chernovetsky allleged. "It is she
who has caused the work (tearing the shopping centre down) to be stopped."
President Yushchenko weighed in later in the day on the Kiev Mayor's side,
telling reporters he had ordered Tymoshenko to sign over the land.
Yushchenko's declaration was however somewhat empty, observers said, given
that Tymoshenko routinely ignores Presidential instructions, according
to her because she knows better, and according to her opponents because
she wants Yushchenko's job.
The driving force behind the Troitsky dispute, Ukrainian political observers
have long agreed, is the almost astronomical value of land, and profits
to be had in real estate in the Ukrainian capital, where apartment prices
these days rival Paris and sometimes even London, and where national political
issues more often than not come down to which commercial clan will gain
or lose from the decision.
Hryhory Surkis, one of Ukraine's richest men and as head of the Federation
of Football of Ukraine (FFU) the instigator of Ukraine's successful Euro
2012 bid, expressed dismay at news that work had stopped at the Troitsky
shopping centre.
"If work on tearing down Troitsky is truly stopped, it would be a
step towards the final downfall of all our hopes," Surkis said, according
to a statement posted on the FFU web site.
A worrying Ukrainian political reality wallpapered over by the Ukrainian
government during Platini's visit, but long part of the swirling political
reality accepted by the country's observers, is that Surkis' political
opponents in the past have included Tymoshenko, Yushchenko, Chernovetsky,
and Vadim Novinsky, owner of the Eugene Construction Company.
"No one has told us when we start work again," a construction
worker told a dpa reporter visiting the Troitsky site. "We're just
waiting."
nationmultimedia.com,
July 10, 2008
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