Medvedev impatient over Sochi delays

President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday ordered the government to ensure facilities for Russia's 2014 Winter Olympics were finished on time, in a rare official show of impatience with the sluggish progress. Medvedev issued an order to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to guarantee that test events for the Olympics could go ahead as planned and punish those companies responsible for a backlog of delays, the Kremlin said. The Vedomosti daily earlier reported that 76 sites out of 393 objects being built for the Winter Games were behind schedule, quoting a report delivered by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak to a closed meeting with Medvedev this month. The Kremlin did not confirm these figures but Medvedev's orders marked one of the first signs of official frustration over the progress from the authorities, who usually issue confident statements that everything is on track. Medvedev ordered the government to ensure the completion of the "big and small hill ski jumps and the bobsleigh and luge track on schedule, guaranteeing the holding of the test events", the Kremlin said in a statement on its website. He also said that the government should strengthen measures to "bring to responsibility organisations who have not carried out their obligations on time according to their contracts with the state". Medvedev further ordered Prosecutor General Yurg Chaika to take measures to ensure "the interests of society be protected" in cases when companies violated their obligations. He did not say what kind of punishment this could entail. According to Vedomosti, Kozak told Medvedev at the January 5 meeting in Sochi that the delays were being caused by problems of private investors of financing construction work, failure to keep up with timetables and poor organisation at some sites. Vedomosti said that the biggest concerns surrounded the bobsleigh and luge track, as well as the arena where the opening ceremony is due to take place. However Kozak's spokesman insisted that there was no risk of failing to complete the facilities in time for the competitions. "At the moment we see no risks for the 2012-2013 test events -- let alone for the Olympics themselves," Ilya Dzhus told the Interfax news agency. The Vedomosti report said that the January 5 meeting had also discussed the idea of shelving a project to build a new port in Sochi as well as a new electricity plant. Meanwhile, the number of workers engaged on building the other facilities could be raised from 56,000 to 70,000 to ensure they were finished on time, it added. The paper quoted sources as saying the chief culprit for the delays was the state Olympic construction firm Olympstroi -- which has faced allegations of corruption in the past -- rather than the private sector. The Games will be the biggest international event hosted by Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union but it faces the challenge of building much of the facilities from scratch in Sochi city and the surrounding mountains. The Kremlin and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have long insisted that everything will be ready on time while acknowledging there is no time to lose. Medvedev had however alluded to the existence of serious problems, in the official part of the January 5 meeting before it was closed to the media. "The tempo of work is unfortunately not even, due to problems of financing and other issues including timetables and, in a number of cases, simply the bad organisation of work," the Kremlin website quoted him as saying.