Correction: CCTV spending by Aberdeen City, not Aberdeenshire Council

We previously reported that Aberdeenshire had spent part of their torch relay funds on CCTV. This should have said Aberdeen City Council.

We apologise for the error. The original post, and the database, have been corrected.

Aberdeen City Council’s torch relay expenditure can be found here.

Aberdeenshire Council’s funding of torch relay costs can be found here; it is also detailed below.

  • Staff Costs £ 5,912.30
  • Road Closures/Advertisements etc £ 7,640.67
  • Construction Costs £ 4,026.20
  • Vehicle Charges £ 1,613.25
  • Florescent Vests £ 200.00 (retained for future use)
  • Event at Balmoral Castle £ 7,988.62
  • Total Cost £27,381.04

Discover your council’s Torch Relay spending – and help find out more

Olympic Torch Relay Spending Database

We’re opening up our database of £4m of spending based on FOI request responses from 100 local councils and police authorities.

As we reported last week, the responses contain some interesting budget decisions – from a specific staff position in one authority lasting 18 months to the excessive cost of bunting. What can you find in the figures?

Here are just some more that we’ve found:

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Useful Olympic links for July 25th through July 27th

Here are the Olympic-related links we’ve been looking at over the last week from July 25th through July 27th:

  • The Olympic Torch and how to game an eBay auction | The Albert Memorial is still there – Looking at the actual bidders in the actual auctions for each individual torch, the auctions are set to either private (so the usernames of the bidders are hidden), or from bidders apparently new to eBay with low feedback scores or histories of buying other items. There is also no indication of a behaviour of bidders bidding for one torch, being outbid, and then moving on to a torch with lower current bids – all the bidders seem to be clustered around just the one torch their bidding is attached to. What this indicates to me is that actually most of the bidding on London 2012 Olympic torches is not genuine – that most of it is being carried out by sock puppets, false eBay identities created in order to artificially up the bidding of items in order to create the impression of higher demand and a high value.
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Useful Olympic links for July 11th through July 12th

Here are the Olympic-related links we’ve been looking at over the last week from July 11th through July 12th: