It seems your reasonings are contradicting your excuses.
I understand that costs may change over time. I also understand that the extra 100,000 EUR you received in the past was “there to be used for unpredictable increases or added spending.”
What I don’t understand is that you received 220,000 EUR for food, spent half of it, and never returned any funds despite a 100,000 EUR contingency. This implies you had an extra ~210,000 EUR (110,000 EUR in unspent food funds + a 100,000 EUR contingency). So, either somebody is inflating invoices to pocket money, or you aren’t great at estimating projected costs.
This is regarding Decoded 2023, which you unfortunately already got away with after submitting your final expense report six months late (you originally told us in July that it would be available “next month” → August; you only provided this in January, just before needing to submit your pre-funding proposal for Decoded 2024).
Regarding Decoded 2024, unfortunately, considering how things went (and the still existing suspicion around Decoded 2023), I don’t believe you’ll be able to sufficiently address my concerns until a third-party audit has been completed and all invoices & receipts have been investigated.
Furthermore, and again, I really think enough is enough. Just look at one of your recent excuses → You were given 80,000 EUR for food and then tried to make an excuse that providing free food would cost 70,000 EUR. What would the concern have been, only having 10,000 EUR left for water? You can buy plenty of water with 10,000 EUR.
ChaosDAO gave everyone unlimited beer for two days straight for 30,000 EUR, yet, with more than twice the amount, all you could provide was water. Really? A bunch of lads who aren’t necessarily experts in event organization were able to figure out how to spend money efficiently, but you couldn’t? Make it make sense. Please convince me that you’re not inflating invoices to pocket money because the more I think about it, the more that is the only thing that makes this make sense.
More importantly, the community is once again rallying to point out concerns & provide feedback on how you should have done things. Why are we doing this? Birdo provided a constructive report of things that should come naturally to you. He shouldn’t need to post these things. You are paid and supposed to be the expert here, and we shouldn’t need to do these things. We do them because things, once again, have not been executed well. Enough is enough.