Saturday 27 August 2016

Is it all about the Benjamin's?

An interesting article on the current state of FIDE finances by Peter Doggers at chess.com. It seems FIDE have been guilty of what many 'soon-to-be-insolvent' organisations do, and that is off budget spending. As it is easier to incur off budget expenses than it is to earn off budget income, this usually results in a decrease in liquidity rather than an increase.
The only hero in this story appears to be current FIDE Treasurer Adrian Siegel, who raised objections to non budgeted spending, but he was overruled by the FIDE Presidential Board. Of course the long term plan maybe to get Kirsan to contribute the $20 million that he promised at the 2014 FIDE Congress, but so far there has been no evidence to indicate that this is likely to happen.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can find the earlier version of this Doggers article in a Google cache for this page

https://www.chess.com/news/is-fide-in-financial-trouble-5434

As you can see, he added a lot more comments from the relevant people (everything else is just looking at ledgers).

Xerxes IV said...

It was commented on Chess.Com that the Commission honorariums (90000 euros in 2015) were not listed in the 2016 budget, possibly due to an Excel spreadsheet formatting error.

Do you know anything about this? Was there a decision taken to eliminate them? Are they likely to be paid anyway?

Anonymous said...

Makro never believed the $20m (Minutes page 7)

Makro: I do not know if $ 20 million are on their way or even that $ 10 million will be on their way or if Kirsan wanted to say to Garry during this announcement that Garry if you want to say fairytales, I can say better fairytales than you. I do not know what was exactly the situation there, but for me really we should not change anything for the moment because we cannot see that we can change something like this.

Mr. Hinge said: I would like to build on that I would like to ask a very specific question. These was a promise to get $20 million into a FIDE account, that is a simple question, on 11 th August, when do we expect this money to be reflected in the FIDE account? (Filatov interrupted before this went anywhere, ending with "Russian businessmen were waiting for the results of the elections", seemingly as a fulcrum against Sinquefield's money).

Makro: You know very well, Garry, that there you had no chance to win these elections. 100 millions you could guarantee or one billion. So this game is well-known, that is why you play this game. If you knew that really you had any chances to win, or really that you were close, (and you know that you were very far from winning), then I am sured you would not play this game. This is my opinion and of course I am right to have whatever opinion I believe is correct here. So it is better to stop playing now with these numbers, that you know very well that you open this situation with 10 million here, Kirsan continued with 20.

Shaun Press said...

Xerxes, all I know were about the honorariums is that they were paid in 2014, as I received two. In fact I was so surprised to see money magically appear in my account from FIDE that I immediately contacted the FIDE Office in Athens to make sure this was a legitimate payment, and not some sort of pre election sweetener.
After the 2014 election commission budgets got cut, and I assume that the honorariums would have been the first to go (as they were the last budget items added). However I know no more than this, as am no longer a member of any commissions.

ThanklessTemerity said...

The honorarium is clearly covered in the 2013 EB minutes. Freeman noted a surplus of 230000-odd euros, then

Mr. N. Freeman proposed from the next year to pay honorarium to Commission
members:
2,000 for Commission Chairmen,
1,500 for Commission Secretaries
1,000 each for the core Councillors
He said that it is a small honorarium, the work these people do deserves a lot more, but
he believes that now FIDE is in a position to thank those who work for what they are
doing.