Irish firm helped Qatar’s cool bid

IRISH entrepreneurs helped Qatari football chiefs keep cool heads in their successful bid for World Cup 2022.

Dublin-based company Mercury Engineering was given the goal of building an air conditioning system for use in a World Cup stadium.

To score the lucrative bid the company had to create a 500-seater showcase arena within months to win over the Qatari authorities.

Michael Kennedy, managing director, said the company pulled out all the stops with 160 men working on the ambitious project over 10 weeks. “It’s a zero carbon technology using solar panels to bring the temperature down from what it can get there, 50C to 20C for both spectators and for the players,” Mr Kennedy said.

In June and July, average temperatures creep up to 45C in the stifling Middle East state. After working flat out for 10 weeks the Fifa delegation visited Qatar in September to inspect and watch a five a side match in the showcase stadium, with the temperature at a comfortable 20C.

“The team did an excellent job on this prototype stadium and we are now looking forward to playing a key role in the construction of the various stadia and other projects in the run up to the 2022 World Cup,” Mr Kennedy added.

Russian cities need huge cash boost to host World Cup

By Nataliya Vasilyeva

THE Russian government will have to pump billions into some of the country’s crumbling cities to host the 2018 World Cup.

Yet financial analysts say the effort to give some credence to authorities’ depiction of Russia as a bustling member of modern Europe is unlikely to lead to lasting changes in the economy.

“Anyone who’s lived in this country knows there are urgent challenges and a need for structural reforms, but things like the World Cup are unlikely to give an impetus to structural reforms,” said Yulia Tsyplyayeva, chief economist at Moscow’s office of BNP Paribas.

Even Moscow and St Petersburg — Russia’s most modern cities — would have to drastically increase the number of affordable hotels to deal with thousands of visiting fans.

But the other 11 Russian cities slated to host World Cup matches need even more challenging infrastructure overhauls to make them viable sporting destinations.

Saransk, a Volga city of 300,000 630km from Moscow, only has a few hotels, an airport that can only handle short-range planes and roads full of potholes.

Yekaterinburg, the country’s third-largest city, is undergoing a hurried transformation, where modern glass-and-steel office high-rises are clumsily plunked next to single-storey old wooden houses. Soviet-era buses ply the streets belching out putrid black exhaust smoke.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in Zurich that Russia would spend €7.5 billion to prepare for the World Cup. However, the respected business daily Vedomosti speculated the costs could exceed €37bn, a price it called “too high for some of us to have a chance to see the matches and for the Russian team to get a spot in the finals”.

Still, any investment is better than none, analysts said, and Russia may benefit from the investment multiplier effect. “We can gain a lot from it because the infrastructure in Russia has been woefully under-invested, and even small investments in infrastructure produce immediate positive results,” Tsyplyayeva said.

The Moscow-based UralSib bank said the World Cup will “inject a great deal more urgency — and a stricter timeline — into the government’s modernisation programme”.