Russian

Russia's Channel One announces that Eurovision results were unfairly juggled

Time of publication: 28.05.2003 (23:44)
Channel One, organizers of Eurovision in Russia, officially announced their mistrust in the results of the Eurovision Song Contest 2003, which took place in Riga on the 24th of May. "The basis of our mistrust were the unbelievably low points for Russia, given by some of the countries in the Euro Union (UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Malta, Sweden and Norway), and also information, which came from Ireland’s telephone provider Eircom, that was published on the Internet on the 27th of May," said Igor Burenkov, the director of Channel One's general communications to Interfax. The essence of the information, explains Burenkov, comes by the fact that the votes in Ireland were changed to the votes of the national jury at the last moment, the reason being a misunderstanding between telephone providers and announcers on Eurovision. As a result, the points given by Ireland to Russia were way far from the real picture, shown by the telephone providers. At the moment, Channel One is going to send an official complaint about the matter to the Eurovision’s announcing committee, says Igor Burenkov. He added, that he also intends to ask for "the official information of the voting process from telephone providers, on which the Eurovision’s voting was based on. Taking into account the small difference between the first place and the third place (3 points), we have good reasons to believe that Russia’s results would have been much better," finished Burenkov.

Source: TatySite.net (by InterMedia)
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