Harassment | The Ministry of Foreign Affairs cancels the use of the law firm in the case of Ambassador Vilén

State Department has decided not to use a private law firm to investigate the ambassador to Jari Vilén accusations of harassment.

The Undersecretary of State of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs tells HS about this Pekka Puustinen.

“The top management has stated that the cost is too high for this kind of work,” says Puustinen.

For top management, Puustinen refers to the head of the chancellery and the foreign minister To Elina Valtosen (cook).

“Our own estimate was – and it was certainly quite optimistic – that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could have spent some tens of thousands on this part of the work. When the estimate was significantly bigger, we're talking about a couple of hundred thousand euros, we couldn't accept this,” says Puustinen.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs' procurement decision did not yet include a cost estimate, but the costs were estimated to be below the 300,000 euro threshold of the Procurement Act.

The hourly prices of Roschieri's lawyers were listed as the most expensive 840 euros and the lowest 280 euros per hour. A ten percent discount on hourly prices had been negotiated.

Last week it was reported that the employees of the Finnish Embassy in Ottawa have made several harassment reports about Ambassador Vilén.

In the extensive letter, the employees say, among other things, that Vilén touched women inappropriately, behaved in a threatening manner and spoke demeaningly about minorities. Vilén himself has said that he does not recognize the accusations.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had already hired the private law firm Roschieri to investigate the case, because, according to Puustinen, the case was so “wide-ranging and multi-faceted”.

The investigation will continue under Puustisinen's leadership as usual with the ministry's own civil servants. The officials are supposed to investigate the case from Helsinki and possibly travel to Ottawa in early April.

A procurement decision had also been made for Roschier's services in the case of another embassy, ​​he said Evening newspaper on Friday. In this case as well, the use of the law firm has been canceled and the investigative work has been transferred to official work.

Law firm the use also raised questions about whether an outsider can be hired to do official work of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in this way.

Ombudsman of the Parliament Petri Jääskeläinen had time to take over the activities of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On his own initiative, he wanted to investigate the procedure in which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs uses a private law firm to investigate an occupational health and safety matter belonging to the employer.

Harassment reports are an occupational health and safety matter, which the employer is responsible for investigating. When the employer is an authority, the investigation should be an official job, the ombudsman's office told HS earlier on Friday.

According to Puustisinen, it is good that the ombudsman took the case into consideration. However, according to him, this did not affect the decision not to use a law firm.

“It has not affected in any way. The management has always known some kind of concern or thought that they also want to know the cost impact, because it is important.”

So there were no reasons other than cost reasons?

“Yes, that was the obvious reason. The top management decided that we can't proceed like this, but let's proceed with normal work.”