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Days before the official opening of the Special Olympics games for people with mental disabilities, articles appeared in the Greek press according to which the chairwoman of the organizing committee Yanna Despotopoulou and her family have organized a family celebration with state funds. According to a report in Ethnos, the financial management of the sporting event is such that it could attract the prosecution interest. The total cost of the Games in Athens is almost 70 million euros, while the budgets of these games in Shanghai and Dublin were just half that amount.

Only the opening ceremony was worth about 7.7 million euros, and the "insolvent" Greece has to provide 28.2 million euros from the state budget and through sponsorship by public companies. According to the article in Ethnos, this means that in addition to the state sponsorship the government would have to provide another 40 million euros in times extremely difficult for its finances.

The initial budget of € 87 million euros that was approved in 2008 was reduced to some degree two years later on the proposal of the Deputy Minister of Health. It was based on the fact that there have been delays and even a lack of revenue from sponsorships, and that it was impossible to cover them with state funds.

Twenty days before the start of the games, the budget was not approved because the expenses included the reserve amount of 2.6 million euros that the government had set aside to cover unforeseen costs outside the regulated public participation. In other words, the organizing committee of the games included the amount in an unlawful manner and in fact it refused to limit some of the costs and even insisted on the implementation of expensive events such as the lavish opening ceremony and the fiestas for the official guests.
 
The assigning the organization of the games to specific companies is quite confusing too. According to the article, 3-4 companies participated in some of the competitions with different bids in the range of 5-10 per cent in order to exchange the assignments and all the companies have the same owner.
 
According to some sources, when an owner of an applying company was not part of Yanna Despotopoulou’s circle of friends the offer was rejected with the lowest possible score. Although the original plan provided for the implementation of 40 international and national competitions only a few were held. The same sources say that, most of the deliveries were made at the last moment in order to ensure the success of specific companies or to assign the contracts in a direct manner.
 
Also, the largest share of the games budget or 10.8 million euros were provided for the supply of technologies and three years ago, the son of the chairwoman of the organizing committee Elyas Despotopulos became the head of the department with an annual salary of 93,000 euros. Yanna Despotopoulou herself does not seem to have saved for her personal comfort after her trip to Washington in November 2010 cost the organizing committee 10,000 euros.

The author of the article points out that Special Olympics is a mass sport program which includes only people with disabilities, i.e. only one of the five categories included in the Paralympic Games. They are organized by the private Greek association Special Olympics, which is a subsidiary of the US association the Kennedy Foundation established in 1968.

Special Olympics is not a federation and is managed by a life board appointed by its US sibling and chaired by Yanna Despotopoulou. According to the Greek law on sports, when the state participates in the funding of a sports event there should be an independent committee to control the proper allocation of the funds. In this case, the situation is getting more unclear given that this committee is chaired again by Yanna Despotopoulou, says the article in Ethnos.