is the most valuable, lucrative and expensive in FIFA history.
Record numbers include a $35 million prize to the winning team’s federation, $4 billion commercial revenue for FIFA and a $14 billion bill for Brazil.
And
As street protesters in Brazil know, FIFA’s revenue is untaxed there. World Cup sponsors and media also receive exemptions for their operations as a condition of Brazil’s hosting bid in 2007.
FIFA, however, has spent significantly in Brazil.
FIFA already gave $221.6 million to the embattled organizing committee, and more should follow in last-minute wrangling over paying for essential services.
Odebrecht’s certainly making out like gangbusters:
Brazilian Builder Odebrecht Emerges as World Cup Winner
Odebrecht is helping erect or expand four World Cup stadiums, financed with 1.5 billion reais ($447 million) in subsidized loans from Brazil’s state development bank. The company is one of the biggest contributors to Rousseff’s worker’s party, a relationship not lost on people critical of the World Cup’s cost to taxpayers.
Hmmm . . . Brazil, Inc.,
“Brazil has a lot of state-owned companies and big private firms with strong ties to governments in what I like to call Brazil Inc.,” said Peter Lannigan, managing director at broker-dealer CRT Capital Group LLC. . . .
Campaign donations from five Odebrecht units grew to 37.9 million reais in 2012, from 8.1 million in 2002, according to the electoral tribunal. Odebrecht’s building unit gave 6 million reais to the worker’s party in 2013, as incumbent Rousseff, a former guerrilla who was tortured by the military regime, seeks re-election. Units of World Cup stadium builders OAS SA, Queiroz Galvao SA and UTC Enghenaria SA also ranked among the top 10 contributors
Related: The Billion-Dollar Business Of The World Cup