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Future of Olympic facilities in Sochi still up in the air

The state and Olympic investors in Sochi have devised how to use their infrastructure, including hotels, after the 2014 Olympic Games

The state and Olympic investors in Sochi have devised how to use their infrastructure, including hotels, after the 2014 Olympic Games. The Kommersant daily has learnt that the head of Sberbank (the Savings Bank), German Gref, offered to oblige state companies to hold yearly meetings of shareholders in Sochi.

The offer came within the framework of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s instruction to support Olympic developers. “Many investors are concerned about how the whole infrastructure, including hotels, will be used in Sochi after the Olympics, so that not to have their financial model of Olympic construction violated. With that in view, the idea of the Sberbank leadership looks quite logical,” the Kommersant notes.

Hotels with a total amount of almost 25,000 guest rooms will be built in the city for the Olympic Games. Apart from Sberbank, the list of major investors in hotel construction also includes companies of Gazprom, Vladimir Potanin’s Interrosa, Oleg Deripaska’s BasEL, Viktor Vekselberg’s Renova. Expenditures for Sochi’s preparation for the Olympics, including investors’ money, have exceeded one trillion rubles. The guestroom stock that Sochi will have by the Olympics is comparable with the hotel market of Moscow: according to data by GVA Sawyer, it will have 23,000 guest rooms. “Hotel occupancy may be high in the first few months after the Olympic Games, but none of the hoteliers undertakes to forecast how things will develop in the future,” the deputy director for hospitality industry development at CBRE, Stanislav Ivashkevich, said.

Not only investors worry about the future of Olympic facilities. The Agency for Strategic Initiatives intends to stage in Sochi after the Olympics a business management skills championship. Some investors in the Olympics offer the authorities to oblige organizers of major exhibitions to hold them in Sochi, a federal official told the Kommersant. But this is problematic, he specified, as “there are not so many state exhibitions, and it is impossible to oblige private companies”.

Itar-Tass is not responsible for the material quoted in these press reviews

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