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.
Corruption, court cases, and delays: read more on Russia's costly football World Cup preparations.
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.
