The workers of the Solna branch of the German LIDL in Sweden had a brilliant an idea of how to take care of the homeless problem. Really does make you think of how cruel life even in a civilized welfare state like Sweden can be. For starters, you need to be destitute to go to LIDL in the first place let alone skipdive.

I wonder if that would have been adapted to the USA by Wal-Mart if the Republicans had won?

Oh wow, wonder why. Lets not build new roads and the problem will just go away. The HS writes:

All the main arterial roads in the Helsinki area threaten to become blocked because of excessive traffic volumes within the next ten years. Blockages threaten at least some sections of every single main highway. The maximum capacity of at least some of the main trunk roads has already been exceeded.

No shit sherlocks. I can see it daily past my office window. Quite used to the traffic noise. And whats the solution? Congestion charges. yeah right.

OK, Phil, start taking a bicycle to work. its all you Espoo yuppies to blame, especially the Westend voters who don’t want the metro to bring in the rif-raf.

A small storm in the glass. The two highest managers of VR - the national railway operator resigned. Nothing really new in that the government-owned companies have government messing into the business. However I am at a loss as to who came up with this brainfart. As we are in the EU the competition tender process is open. So there is nothing ensuring the Transtech plant would land the contract (*). By all probability we’ll be getting some sighing trains again, this time from Spain, only to be used in summertime.

Meanwhile, if anyone wants a hovercraft - the Finnish Navy has one been sitting for 5 years unused. Cost only 16 million euros and then some brainfart decided it wasn’t such a brilliant idea any more.

(*) of course as we all know there is no corruption in Finland and such…

I always *love* it when Finland gets into international news. Well, this time over the issue was boiling hot domestically and no wonder. The HS international Edition basic description of the events. Basically, a new editor-in-chief Johanna Korhonen, was hired to the Eastern Lapland regional newspaper Lapin Kansa which is published by a big Finnish publishing house Alma Media. And she was fired before she started in her job the reason being given there was a “lack of trust”   Well, the lady in question, who has been among other things the editor-in-chief of the newspaper of the Finnish Union of Journalists cried “foul” and stated in a press release she got sacked because she is living in a registered partnership with a woman.  The CEO of Alma Media Kai Telanne stated that the reason of course is not that, nothing discriminatory etcetera, but the fact that her partner is active in municipal politics while the editor should be politically nonaligned and the CEO said she had been fired for lying in her job interview, and she is just using the lesbian card.

And everybody thought in the traditional Finnish manner the issue would be brushed under the carpet.

Oops, not quite so… today had the Alma Media board of directors publishing a very curt statement of how they stand behind the CEO and do not want to discuss issues “that do not belong in the public”. Laughing my ass off as Alma Media publishes the worst scandal tabloid Iltalehti…

So what is the opinion - the current editor-in-chief of Lapin Kansa stated that an “while nobody asks what people do in their private lives as long as they keep int the closet an openly gay person would find it difficult to act as the editor-in-chief as the newspaper represents the region”.  Well, the region represented nor the newspaper doesn’t wish to be labelled as a redneck bible-belt hickdom it seems. The editors of the Lapin Kansa newspaper have demanded the CEO of Alma Media quits and is removed from the board of Lapin Kansa, The Lapland University’s women studies researchers has started rallying a boycott against Alma Media and its been said people have been canceling their subscriptions. The opinion is still out whether what Korhonen alleges is true - if it is then this is one of the most blatant discrimination cases to pop up.

Legal experts and journalists have come forth stating that personal issues should not be taken up in job interviews, and that as each person is responsible for themselves it is unfair to have some persons job depending on their spouses political activity. The government has stated that the issue should be investigated thoroughly - there was a debate but the government wanted facts as the situation is unclear. Meanwhile the biggest shareholder, a private investor stated that the “publicity is good” and that Alma Media stocks are on the rise. The Nordic newspapers also picked up on the story, especially the Danes as they have also a holding in Alma Media.

Yay! Publicity!  It seems that anything that is said or done in this case will cause another crap sandwich to appear in the lunchbox.

EDIT: 3.10 update HS International Edition of the new developments

So there it was, the 700 billion dollar bail-out plan on the table and there it stayed. The House of Representatives vote on the bill was split. Of the 205 votes for there were 65 Republicans and 140 Democrats and of the 228 votes against 133 Republicans and 95 Democrats. The analysts noted that representatives looking for re-election were most likely to vote no for the unpopular bill. Republican house leader John Boehner repotedly described the package as a “crap sandwich” in his floor speech before the vote.

President George W Bush renewed calls for Congress to back the bill stating the obvious: “”We are in an urgent situation and the consequences will grow worse each day if we do not act.” Congress will not meet again until Thursday - after a break for the Jewish New Year - with another vote unlikely before the weekend, by the time an amended version of the bail-out bill will be introduced.

The US stock market reacted to both the bill failing with Dow Jones dropping 770 points as well as Mr. Bush’s speech on Tuesday when the Dow Jones rose by some 200 points. The stock markets around the world followed the wave trend and in Russia the exchange was closed for a while. The subprime mortgage crisis has hit a number of European banks, but the credit crunch is biting hard.

The EU commission released a statement calling for the US to take its responsibility and try to stabilize the markets. The EU parliament is making a formal request to the Commission to propose new legislation to improve regulation of financial markets, in particular regarding hedge funds and private equity investors. They also want measures to deal with some of the causes of the credit crunch.

The governments of Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg agreed to use 11.2 billion euros to save Fortis, and only today the French, Belgian and Luxembourg governments declared another bank Dexia is on the same nationalisation path with 6.4 billion euros being poured in. Meanwhile in Iceland the Glitnir bank was taken over by the government and in the UK mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley was nationalised. No doubt this next week will bring forth other similar news from around the globe.

Meanwhile in the USA there is five weeks left for the presidential elections.

A small piece of news struck my eye yesterday and made me thoughtful. Theres been a restructuring of the 112 call centres into a national organization instead of the previous county-run regional units since the 2000’s, and the results have been a bit questionable. The nationalization of the Helsinki emergency centre has been blasted as the restructuring has caused and stated that the safety in the region has come down. Another question is the services in the Swedish-speaking areas.

Basically before you also had the police as well as ambulances or fire departments have their own numbers you could call for “less emergency” so you’d call the “emergency number” when the house was on fire, but the lesser number when the cat was up the tree. But now you deal only with the 112 with all kinds of nonsense. Which isn’t anything peculiar to just Finland.

The new reform into larger units also caused some problems as many villages and towns have similar or the same streetnames, and the 112 operators weren’t necessarily that versed with the area. So in 2002 a “middle aged woman” who worked on the west coast got a warning from the court as she’d directed an ambulance to the wrong city and a man with chest pains died of a heart attack.

The yesterdays piece of news said that the same woman had been fined in court for negligence of duty and stripped of her office, as she had cut approximately a hundred 112 calls that then had redirected to other operators in 2006. She had logged these as missed calls or wrong numbers. Apparently the stress and workload at the 112 centre had overwhelmed her - maybe the first mishap was a cause or a symptom, but the manager of the centre said that of course the “performance is evaluated”… Now I can understand this is a job that does not bring in profit - but now you need to remember that we are talking of peoples lives - so adding insult to injury and stressing the workers out when the job itself is stressful enough sounds they should hire comrade Stahanov.

At the end of the day, who can your stressed out 112 operator call?

Cliff notes: emergency services in emergency

(Sorry the article didn’t get all there the first time because of the database hiccups.
Hank W.)

Going once, going twice, gone… and there go the jobs in the paper industry. As the global recession dawns upon us there is going to be more and more “pops” when the weasels take our jobs and run away with the money. And what will the politicians do? Build garden cities. Yes, and meanwhile “Finland needs more workers”… sorry, did someone say “a cheap exploitable labor force”? There is always someone out there desperate enough to be brought in to do the job cheaper.

I always contradict people saying there is a “shortage of nurses”. There is no “shortage of nurses”. There is a “shortage of money and tenures” which results in people not wishing to enter the profession which has created an illusion of a shortage of nurses. Finnish polytechnics churn out about 3000 nurses per year - after 5 years maybe 500 remain in the profession. And why is that? The job is hard, the pay lousy and you have only short-term contracts. So instead of making the profession something people want to do - the answer is to bring in people from someplace where the conditions are if possibly worse and they think they are getting a good deal.

There wouldn’t be all these Finnish nurses working for the NHS in the UK or Norway unless it was the same situation - the Finnish nurses think they get a good deal. While on the one hand economically bringing in foreign nurses is a business decision - we wait 10 years. That nurse has either gone back home after saving enough money for a new house and childrens college, or then the nurse has a family here. She wants a better salary and a continuous job contract, but as the culture of exploitation is there - what is the answer? To bring in some other - cheaper nurse working for peanuts and not complaining of actually having to support a family on those wages. So it continues on and on and on without anyone needing to address the core problems of the system itself.

So I would rather say “Finland needs more jobs” - but theres always the patent answer of creating your own. Oh yes, even back in the days of the big recession of the 1990’s the magical answer was for everyone to put up an enterprise and start selling soap and vitamins. Fixed the statistics greatly but how many people selling soap and vitamins to each other do we need? Does the economy of a village run on everyone selling soap and vitamins to each other? Because the fact is that the production industries are outsourcing and if there is no production there is not much money in the economy after a while. Not that there is a lack of the “enterpreneurial spirit” in Finland. Or would this “make money and become rich” spirit. Now as everyone knows one cannot come rich in Finland with honest work. The welfare state has its hand in your pocket. But as the human animal operates on greed we have now had not only one but two pyramid schemes where someone has gotten the great idea of making a fast buck off peoples greed. The WinCapita system allegedly had 10 000 Finns “invest” hundred million euros into the pyramid… that is quite a mind-boggling sum to think of. Another smaller scheme called GPP has just unraveled selling “pension insurance”… So what does *that* say of the country? We do remember Albania had a revolution in the 1997 due to a pyramid scheme taking all the money out of the system - they were probably high up in the “global competitiveness” figures back then - before the weasels popped the bubble.

It is questionable how far Finland could afford to copy the Nordic Welfare State model with its limited resources in the first place. It has worked so far, but even Sweden has been showing a hiccup… Norway has oil and gas to support their regional policies, but Finland just thinks it has resources. The current political parties - the three largest having equal 21% of the vote at the moment cannot come into consensus of what needs to be done - so everyone does something and the direction… The decisions made back during the big recession of the 1990’s was to “liberalize” the economy have now in 15 years resulted in the liberated industries escaping away. You look at the latest survey on the “hi-tech” Finland and its broadband connections. Even if done by Cisco which has its own interests. The government expects private market forces to take care of the infrastructure - and what is the result? Finland is now in 13th place. Really is this the way to go? We are living interesting times as they say in the Chinese proverb. But Finland isn’t as much alone any more - the rest of the EU is to be considered, but is the direction of the EU any clearer? Surely each country is pulling into its own direction - and is the EU not a giant on clay feet?

So what will Finland be like in 5 or 10 years with the global competition? Weasellandia 2018? Scrapped remains of a welfare state turned into a cut-throat globalized capitalist state with huge income gaps and poverty - a polarized society with ghettos with proles the weasels use as a resource pool of easily exploitable cheap labor that can be popped off when not needed?

The only thing your average Finn can do thinking about this is drink cheap alcohol imported from Estonia and look at how the country is going to hell in a handbasket - and that is my positive outlook of the day.

Cliff Notes: Paha maa

The YLE scandal investigative journalism programme MOT broadcasted last week has caused diplomatic strain between Finland and Slovenia, both small EU countries whose populations probably never much were aware of each others existence. The MOT programme revealed the Finnish defence contractor Patria of paying bribes to gain a lucrative deal on ATV’s for the Slovenian armed forces. The police investigation on the case along with an investigation of a previous deal of howitzers to Egypt had started in May, and the CEO of Patria had stood down from his position. Patrias deals before such as that with Poland also raised some questions but no investigations were started. As the Finnish NBI investigations are noted for their rapidity, the case is expected to go to the prosecutor in October and a possible court case to take place sometime next year.

Meanwhile in Slovenia the MOT programme caused an uproar, as the programme suggests that on the receiving end of the bribes was the sitting prime minister Janez Janša, who is along with his party just preparing for a tight parliamentary election. The Slovenian government even produced two diplomatic notes over the MOT programme to the Finnish government demanding proof of the accusations. Despite both YLE and Patria are to some extent government-owned, the Finnish government said that they can not much do anything about the situation at present. Janša has denied any bribery even been suggested to him by Patria, though he said the other party in the tender process did as for meetings. Which seems very interesting indeed.

The can of hairy worms the MOT programme opened is actually an old one, but it does seem to squirm vigorously. The contract was signed in December 2006 and was the biggest arms deal in Slovenia so far and thus a huge issue in Slovenia, basically as the other rejected tender was from a Slovenian company later sold to an American conglomerate. Allegations of bribery started escalating in Slovenia, going deep into the country’s leadership, including politicians and senior civil servants so a parliamentary commission of inquiry was established in March 2007 to investigate the tender process relating to the sales contract. From what I understand the Slovenians were manufacturing the Steyr-Puch Pandur I on a licence and the competition was between the Patria AMV, Piranha and Pandur II with obvious logistical benefits. Now the Slovenian officials interviewed in the MOT programme were politicaly opposing the current government, and some had ties with the Slovenian contractor. Sour grapes maybe? Or then maybe not… in any case the election race in Slovenia got a surprisingly well-timed injection of scandal.

Cliff notes: Lord of War

After 30 or so years of bickering and nimbying it seems that the nortern wastes of Vantaa will get developed instead of just being industrial areas on the Ring III.  The metro to Espoo seemed about as an absurd idea, but it seems now that there is not only the willpower but also the money to go forth with quite expensive rail projects just as the new number 9 tram in Helsinki. Oh, did I say money? With the slumping economy it seems the developers are having flats nobody is willing to buy, so the risks of housing development projects are higher.

Maybe I should rant here for a moment. The cost of living is so high that people can only afford small studios. There is a huge demand for small studios - currently theres dozens of new students in town sleeping in the gym of the school as they’ve been unable to get flats. However some intelligents in the Helsinki city planning office passed a decision that the avarage flat sizes must be 75 square meters.. meanwhile the mayor Vapaavuori is demanding smaller flats being built… hello? Anybody at home? Its your own zoning stupid! As an example of the big developers hitting the bottom - theres  a development project on Mechelininkatu where the old Matkahuolto depot used to be in a standstill as the flats won’t sell. Studios would, but nobody can afford the bigger flats. I don’t know what the council thinks but if a family has that kind of money to shell out, they’ll buy a house in Kirkkonummi instead of three rooms in a block of flats to raise their family.

These days when I go downtown Helsinki I am amazed as the whole city seem to be dug up half the time. Theres huge development projects also in Helsinki harbour and in Espoo all being initialized at the same time. Now I don’t know if theres going to be overcapacity after the projects have been finished, but at least the building industry will employ a lot of people… and for me it’ll mean a lot more traffic jams. Even now that they are planning to remove the traffic lights from Ring III even last Friday at noon just one bulldozer excavating a lamp post caused a huge traffic jam with a lane being cut off. I’m just sceptical what they can do to the roads - even the Ring III project is a part of the E18 highway and it has the government funding earmarked I cannot fathom what they can do unless they add about four lanes. Meanwhile in Helsinki the huge excavation at the end of Mannerheimintie is gotten to a point they actually cast the concrete roof of the tunnel last week… and the Leppävaara tunnel on Ring I is appearing to be in schedule. Both places are such I rather not go anywhere close to them… the Mannerheimintie intersection is quite a zoo. Funny thing its as if roadwork follows some kind of fashion trends - first it was roundabouts and now it is tunnels… And there is no end to roadwork, I blame global warming, before we had two seasons, winter and roadwork but now its only roadwork.  I’ve also seen the plans of refurbishing my local road with roundabouts and removing the traffic lights - we have some serious accidents almost weekly so I guess that is a good thing - apparently people learning to drive isn’t an option.

What I see as a good point in the whole Marja-Vantaa project is that they are actually basing the development on public transport and making the M-train track into a loop connecting to the main northern track. So at some point in time you can actually take the train to the airport as well. I’m not an ecohippie frothing over public transport, but I do see its benefits. And I am still sore over the YTV planning to screw up my local bus routes.

Check this out - Longtime Finland for Thought reader and friend of mine, Vilja S., was at The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and he did a little bit on Finland! Cool!!

And check out this handsome devil introducing Nokia’s latest application…

Finland has no mandated “minimum salary”. Someone asking that question will get the question back - “what will you be doing?” as the minimum salary in each job is more or less mandated by the comprehensive union agreements that differ a bit if you’re working in the public or private sector and also between industries (A lot of strikes recently have been about a job being outsourced and the new company having a different union agreement, cooks of bank cafeterias and cleaners at the paper factory come to mind). So everyone gets “union wages” in Finland.

But what are the wages then like? Taloussanomat did a survey on the average wages in Finland according to the average salary statistics by job classification and by gender, and compared the lowest rung of the ladder to the higher within the same profession. (The categories are by the Finnish Statistics Centre). Now it is said that the “wage differences in Finland are not that big”. Lets rephrase that, about as like the “cars are the cheapest in Finland” it makes everybody laugh as you need to remember the taxes on top. So the wage differences of the bring-home-pay are not as big in Finland - due to the progressive income taxation.

So who has the suckiest average salary doing a regular 9-5 workday your 38-40 hours a week? (Military not included.) A fraction under the 1600 euro limit would be for women a “farmhand” and for men a “laundry worker”. Thats about the lowest you can get… even a “cleaner” gets in the ballpark of 1700 euros average. But does education help? Do specialists get more salary? Do managers? That again depends on your profession. The lower rung of the specialist ladder is again farm work, a seminologist is in the 1700 euro ballpark. And if you get into mismanagement, the worst salaries are in the hotel- and tourism business.

Now as we’re talking of average salaries the survey also looks into the highest salaries. A stock and currency exchange banker or then your chief surgeon might get into the 5000 -6000 euro category, but thats the top end of the average “rich guys” salary. So what is the salary difference like? According to the nifty tax calculator provided by VERO ( just ballpark figures counted with 13 mo salary ):

1600e/month your income tax% is 16,5, take home pay ~ 1336 euros a month
6000e/month your income tax% is 36,5, take home pay ~ 3827 euros a month

So before taxes the income is 3,75 times, after taxes only 2,8… yay, socialism! BTW the SDP party secretary makes 6900 euros a month… yay socialism!

Growing up in Finland I heard a lot from the politicians “its a lottery win to be born in Finland”. When I had grown up I realized “you require a lottery win to be able to live in Finland”.

Things are expensive in Finland - maybe not that expensive in comparison with the other Nordic countries with a similar taxation and geographical structure, but expensive to the average consumer as the purchase power in Finland is low. The Finnish financial magazine Taloussanomat wrote about the purchase power in Finland earlier this month. According to the article , “Finns are paying themselves sick” for goods and services. Lack of competition is given as one of the a reasons why for example groceries in Finland cost one fifth more than the EU average. Finland has been quite notorious for keeping foreign competition out, and now that there are no more barriers it seems nobody is really interested in coming over as the volumes aren’t there. So Finland remains a keskolandia.

Now being somewhere at the EU average is one thing, but starting to compare things globally doesn’t make the prices look any better. When Phil goes to buy a chicken in Finland, his cousin in the USA can buy four chickens with the same price! The Iltalehti had a comparison of prices for groceries in Helsinki, Stockholm, London and New York, and it seems in the UK and USA (and London and New York are expensive cities), you can get by with about half of what you pay in Stockholm or Helsinki. Of course one explanation is the sheer volumes that bring the prices down, but it still is peculiar while milk or potatoes cost approximately the same, in some products, like meat, the price differences can be quadrupled.

With the global food shortage being blamed on the biofuels is causing food prices to go up, it still doesn’t quite explain why in Finland you need to pay your ass off just to buy your basic stuff. Then again if Norwegians come to buy “cheap booze” from Finland, we can say theres a place where things are worse. Or are they - the purchase power in Norway is higher than in Finland . Your avarage consumer is faced with the problem of rising prices and already now the shopping habits of people are changing. Maybe next year this time I’ll be sharing a potato and brown sauce recipe.

One small piece of news in the Iltalehti today struck me as a reminder of a past era. I guess it was the so-called “IT boom” in the late 1990’s in Finland that drew me along, so much I decided to change careers. Of course those guys who were in the forefront starting it went much higher up catching the stars - but they also burned in re-entry. According to the IL Jaakko Rytsölä was sentenced for more or less for “deliberately misallocating money from his debtors - read: tax office” to a year and six months in jail (probational) and 50 hours of community service.

Now you might ask “who”, but the Rytsölä brothers, Antti and Jaakko especially were branded as the icons of the new success story Finland was launching in the late 1990’s. Two brothers from a regular family had started from scratch in 1995 establishing DLC, one of the first ISP’s. Jaakko had started his own IT business when he was 16 selling computer parts, and when his little brother Antti joined him in Helsinki, he was selling hotdogs at the Helsinki Railway station to make the ends meet while the ISP business was in its fledgling state. A few mergers later the Saunalahti was formed and the young men in their twenties were all of a sudden millionaires, remembering that in 1992 the whole country had been more or less bankrupt. Of course the press hounded the new IT millionaires - after all a Lamborghini Diablo as a “company car”? The two young men were favorites in the tabloid headlines. Finnish envy nonwithstanding the flamboyant lifestyle annoyed some, so the police found a red Ferrari in Helsinki traffic a red flag and Jaakko Rytsölä was fined a whopping 100 000 euros for speeding in his Ferrari (oh, he had about seven cars at one time).

The laws of physics say what goes up must come down, unless the escape velocity is fast enough. A Lamborghini is too slow in Finland. When the “IT-boom” as the “dot.com bubble” was called in Finland turned into the bubble that burst, Jaakko Rytsölä lost overnight a record 6 million euros of his calculated wealth of 10 million in the autumn of 2001 when the Jippii group stock crashed 90%. By the spring of 2002 the tax office had filed him bankrupt, but the tax office was still after money, and the result of the trials that followed was handed out today. Jaakko Rytsölä has claimed innocence and stated that the money wasn’t hidden anywhere but was invested and thus was lost in the stock crashes.

The boom/bubble era had a lot of similar from rags-to riches-to rags stories. Many of the people were young and maybe perhaps been hearing from their parents the “no money” saga growing up so once money was coming from the doors and windows the “crazy years” of the 1980’s came back overnight. It was an era to seize the moment - but there were other people running away with the money. As the dot.com bubble burst in the USA, the flash downed several Finnish companies who had gone venturing to Europe such as Jippii and Sonera which lost huge investments in Germany. And the aftermath was bankrupcy trials, insider trading suits… USA had Enron but we had our own scandals we remember the 2000’s for.

Comparing to the “crazy years” of the 1980’s the dot.com bubble years in the 1990’s could be called “riot years”. If you haven’t seen it before, try to find the documentary Riot On!, its about a small Finnish gaming company Riot-E which got 20 million dollars of venture capital… and ” where the f*ck did it all go?”.

But at the end of the day - regardless of how far the frontier is - the tax office is the last man standing.

The Helsingin Sanomat has written about some British & Irish paving labourers who apparently have not had “trouble finding work without speaking any Finnish”. So that proves false the assumption Finns are discriminating xenophobes and racists. Doing a paving job for 3500, sans receipt, when the Finnish quote is 8500-10K and the material cost alone is between 2-3K though might have something to do with the equation. Also the claim that Finnish officials are xenophobes and racists is proven wrong, as if a local Finnish resident would be driving drunk, stealing and doing black labor without paying the social fees and VAT; they’d be in serious trouble. But EU citizens are free to do whatever they effin please. So apparently there is a “need for workers” in Finland indeed and the EU has once again proven to be the source of multiculturalism that enriches the nation. Again three basic theses regarding immigrants in Finland have been proven wrong. I find this quite hilarious, though there’s an owner of a campsite full of complaining Finns (as opposed to whining foreigners) that might not think I am so funny.

Cliff notes: Snatch in Järvenpää

FFT has been somewhat silent of the recent politicial events in Finland. Of course this is smoking gun evidence of censorship, but as the reality is not quite as sinister I’ll do something to rectify the situation now that the database has finally stopped hiccuping.

The proverbial shit hit the fan in May,  from a very offhand statement over election funding. The law passed in 2000 states that MP’s should make a public notice of donations that were over 1700 euros from a single donor.  The Centre parliamentary group leader Timo Kalli went ahead and made  a statement in A-studio tv talkshow that he hadn’t  disclosed  some of his biggest donors - and wouldn’t - as there weren’t any sanctions for not disclosing the donors.  Now a parliamentarian who had himself been drafting the very legislation  showing such a disrespect to the law got people, both in the parliament and the public, to demand if not his head on the platter some other organs put in a vice.

After Kalli had let the cat out of the bag, several more MP’s got a miraculous cure from amnesia and  donors started to appear on the lists.  A curious  “association”  that had donated  money to several Centre party candidates was  “Kehittyvien Maakuntien Suomi” (Finland of Developing Provinces) that after several weeks of  hounding by the press was shown to be made up at the Centre party office, and the funds it redistributed were mainly by a quintet of businessmen with their hands in real estate and other development projects in the “provinces”. Now having a “friendly politician” has always been a businessman’s wet dream, and even if it was only dreaming, a few statements that have been published make the ties too close for comfort.

There were a few other than Centre party candidates who got money from the association, but most of the money was channelled to the Centre. The Centre party claimed to have had no knowledge over the dealings, until it came into public that not only the Centre party officers had been involved in the association, but namely the head of development had been in access of the bank accounts and made money transfers.  Of course, both the head of development and the party secretary have taken a sick leave. The prime minister has distanced himself from the scandal and is now in Japan learning the art of public harakiri.

The public uproar has achieved something - there is an agreement of donation caps, 3000 euros in the municipal elections and 6000 in the parliamentary. As a gentlemen’s agreement it is to be passed as a law - though if there will be sanctions that remains to be seen.

There is a lot of articles on ths case and its slow unfolding and the squirming of politicians in the HS International Edition.  The latest one today, but theres going to be a lot more unraveling. The question of the opposition trying to topple the Prime Minister isn’t quite out of  the question, and the Centre Party is having its own annual meeting shortly and the discussion there can also get somewhat heated.