The District Court is continuing proceedings concerning the contract of VTV’s Inspector General, which paid him two years’ salary without any obligation to work. Tytti Yli-Viikari and Mikko Koira, who was the administrative director at the time of concluding the contract, are accused of gross abuse of office.
Public finances the former chief inspector of the VTV says that, in his view, the termination agreement was made because he was wanted to leave the agency.
“When such an agreement was offered and there were no alternatives,” the official heard as a witness in court explained.
On Monday, the Helsinki District Court will continue its civil criminal proceedings concerning an agreement under which VTV’s chief inspector was paid for two years without any obligation to work before retiring. Due to the agreement, the former CEO of VTV is being prosecuted Tytti Yli-Viikari and served as Administrative Director at the time of the conclusion of the contract Mikko Koiranen. Both are accused of aggravated abuse of office.
According to the Chief Inspector, his perception was that if the contract had not been concluded, he would have continued in the short term in his former style of inspection duties. In the long run, he described his situation as weak.
“When the management drove me away a lot, of course my position in that long run was very weak.”
The prosecutor According to him, the Chief Inspector was employed from June 2016 until the end of July 2018 on terms which, for example, did not require him to be in employment and on the job. According to the agreement, the Chief Inspector received full pay from June 2016 until the end of November of the same year. From December 2016 to the end of July 2018, wages fell to 48 percent.
According to the prosecutor, a total of approximately EUR 67,000 was paid to the chief inspector during the contract. The employment ended after July 2018, and the Chief Inspector retired in accordance with the agreement.
The official told the court that the actual agreement had been negotiated for a couple of days. He says that he talked mostly with Koiranen, but also with Yli-Viikari.
“When this started, Koiranen and Yli-Viikari were on the other side of the table, and they decided to do some such procedure.”
The chief inspector said that he did not feel that he had actually been pressured by Yli-Viikari and Koiranen. However, he added that it was clear that when the management of the agency proposes an agreement, it should act accordingly.
According to the official, there were no actual discussions as to why the contract was offered. He said in retrospect that he had wondered whether the bad working atmosphere at VTV for years would have had an effect.
Chief Inspector according to him, there were no discussions about the legality of the agreement because everything was believed to be in order. He said the agreement was mostly Koiranen’s text and there was no “room for negotiation” for him to understand.
Yli-Viikari’s defense asked whether the official thought that legitimate grounds for dismissal could have been applied to him.
“No,” the official said.
Koiranen, who represented himself in court, asked when the official had thought to leave VTV’s service.
“It wasn’t a very exact time, but in the next few years from that time (spring 2016). But there was no tight schedule, ”the official replied.
Yli-Viikari and Koiranen have previously justified the termination agreement on the grounds, among other things, that the agreement ensured that the Chief Inspector would not delay the start of his pension for 68 years. Yli-Viikari said in court last week that this had seemed possible for the chief inspector.
Yli-Viikari told the court last week that the chief inspector had not survived his job for decades. In the spring of 2016, Yli-Viikari said that he had heard from the chief inspector of the chief inspector that the official’s duties had been broken down and he had been given “very simple things to sort out”. According to Yli-Viikari, the chief inspector “had not been able to do this either”.
# This (contract) was a much better situation overall and than if he had been at work. Others would have watched when he didn’t work but raised his full salary, ”Yli-Viikari said.
According to Koiranen, the official’s view of his work had also deviated from the assessments of supervisors and unit management for a long time.
The prosecutor is demanding a conditional prison sentence for Yli-Viikari. In addition, the prosecutor demands that Yli-Viikari be sentenced to be removed from office by the post of director general, who has already been dismissed by the plenary session of parliament in the summer. The prosecutor is also demanding that Yli-Viikari be removed from office as the director general of VTV if he is sentenced to imprisonment for an intentional crime.
Yli-Viikari left the position of General Manager in 2016 after being elected CEO. He has said he would like to return to the post.
The prosecutor demands that Koiranen also be sentenced to probation and suspended from office in which the crime was committed.
Yli-Viikaria also charged with breach of duty and fraud in payment instruments. These charges are scheduled to be heard by the district court on Wednesday.
The charges concern the use of Finnair Plus reward points accrued from Yli-Viikari’s business trips to pay private expenses. Yli-Viikari has said that he used the points in his personal points account during the years 2018–2020, but denies that he was guilty of the crime.
Yli-Viikari and Koiranen, who later became the agency’s general counsel, were arrested in April due to suspected crimes.
At the end of June, the plenary session of Parliament dismissed Yli-Viikari. It considered that confidence in Yli-Viikari’s conditions and ability to serve as VTV’s CEO had, as a whole, collapsed due to his actions.
Yli-Viikari has appealed to the Helsinki Administrative Court about his suspension and dismissal. Koiranen has also complained about his suspension.
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