St. Petersburg's former vice-governor has been charged with stealing funds earmarked to build Russia's flagship 2018 FIFA World Cup venue.
Marat Oganesyan is suspected of pocketing 50 million rubles ($780,000) intended for the construction of the Zenit football arena, Russia's Central Investigative Committee confirmed.
Oganesyan allegedly used a sub-contractor, a company providing video screens for the venue, to siphon off the funds in 2014.
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The Zenit arena project, which first began on St. Petersburg's Krestovsky Island in 2007, is already gone an estimated five times over budget.
Some 505 million rubles ($7.8 million) originally reserved for the city's schools, and 1 billion rubles ($15.3 million) allocated for local hospitals have since been relocated to the project.