'Actual cost of staging 2012 London Olympics 'five times 2005 estimate of 2.37 pounds bn'

London, Jan 27(ANI): The actual cost of staging the 2012 Olympics is expected to be five times the estimated figure when London won the bid in 2005,an investigation has found.

A Sky investigation has revealed that the final cost for hosting the Games will be over 12 billion pounds and associated costs could inflate the bill to as high as 24 billion pounds, which is over 10 times the original estimate.

The cost of hosting the Olympics and the Paralympics were estimated at 2.37 billion pounds in 2005, but the UK public sector funding package was increased to about 9.3 billion pounds in 2007,Sky.com reports.

According to the Sky investigation, an extra 2.4 billion pound expenditure over 9.3 billion pounds would be incurred on extra expenses like deploying anti-doping control officers, spending on local councils for their Olympic torch relay programmes, cash spent on legacy schemes, governmental operational costs, the cost of the Olympic Park Legacy Company and legal bills over the stadium tenancy decision, extra pounds to UK Sport and the cost of buying the land for the venues at 766 million pounds.

But it excludes the extra counter-terrorism funding of 1.131 billion pounds, 4.4 billion pound budgets of the security and intelligence services, the opportunity cost of having the majority of the UK police force policing the Games instead of being deployed elsewhere and 6.5 billion pounds on transport upgrades.

Had all the above factors been included the total bill would have shot up to 24 billion pounds, the report said.

Though the investigation has tried to include as many extra Games expenses as possible but there is certainly more spending that has not been accounted for, it added (ANI)