Corruption on Khreshchatyk

The most centrally located football ground in the world is Dynamo Kyiv.

The Valeriy Lobanovskyi stadium is just off Kyiv's main street Kreshchatyk.  It is as if the New York Yankees played their games in Central Park.

Liverpool played there in 2006 in a European Cup qualifying match against Maccabi Haifa.  They had moved the game to Kyiv as they were concerned about the safety of their expensive squad in Israel.

The tickets were expensive at £10 each so I decided to invite the whole media department to the game.  This would give me some guaranteed support.  We won the game 1-1 thanks to a Peter Crouch goal so it was a successful evening.  But the offside rule was waiting for me on Khreshchatyk.

Walking home I was stopped by two policemen.  I have only ever been mugged in Eastern Europe by men in uniform.

They asked me for my 'dokumenty'.

I replied, in Russian, that my passport was at my home.

They were willing to let me off if I gave them 100 hryvnia, about £10 at the time.

I refused.

They reduced the 'fine' to 50 hryvnia.

I still refused.

The Ukrainian I was with told me to pay to avoid the hassle.

I continued to argue.  They could come to my apartment & I would show them my passport.

They told me that I might have to spend 4 hours in a Ukrainian prison.

I replied that Nelson Mandela managed 27 years so 4 hours was reasonable.

Eventually they gave up when they realised that I wasn't going to pay.

I tell this story not as an example of my heroism, which was clearly Dutch courage fuelled by footballing victory.  It is a tale of the stupidity of Ukrainian corruption.

There were many Liverpool fans in Kyiv that night.  Few of them spoke Russian.  Why were the boys in blue wasting their time trying to extract a bribe from the Scottish fool who wouldn't even hand over a fiver when there were plenty of Scousers walking past who would have happily paid £10 just to tell the tale of how they bribed a Ukrainian policeman?

Sadly Ukraine still suffers from this short sighted policy when it comes to its economy.  Their are hundreds of hotels still not built because some bureaucrats are waiting for a large bribe instead of taking a smaller bribe now.... & possibly a few smaller bribes regularly once the business is operating.

We have seen this with the football currently being played.  Ukraine built the stadiums but Poland got the tourists.  Ukraine was simply too expensive to fly to & to stay in.

Kyiv still doesn't have an IKEA.  Ukraine doesn't have an IKEA.

And if you can't even get the fascist Ingvar Kamprad to exploit your peasants for profit you are truly failing to serve your people.