RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – The CEO of the Rio Olympics said Sunday his privately funded operating budget needs just under $30 million in public funding to meet its obligations.
Chief executive officer Sidney Levy had pledged that only private money would be used to run the games. That promise was broken just over a month ago when the committee requested a bailout from the city of Rio de Janeiro and the federal government to run the Paralympic Games.
Levy, speaking on the final day of the Paralympics, said “we committed ourselves to hosting the games without any public funds, but during the journey there were a lot of ups and downs” that led to the overrun.
The operating budget is for running the games themselves, and does not include roads and stadiums built to prepare the city. In a conservative estimate, Rio spent between $10-12 billion in public and private money readying the city – much of the private money lured in by tax concessions and favorable loan terms from government lenders.
Levy, who promised early in his term to run an operating committee free of corruption, said the final figure for the operating budget was $2.8 billion. He said the final government contribution would not be more than 1 percent of that.