AFinland’s new nuclear power plant is scheduled to go into operation on Friday. The reactor on the Baltic island of Olkiluoto has become a symbol of everything that can go wrong when building such a power plant. Four years and 3 billion euros were planned for this, 18 years and more than 9 billion euros. A disaster for the owners? Not at all. “It’s a great reactor,” says Björn Wahlroos. The 70-year-old manager and entrepreneur from Finland enjoys an almost legendary reputation in the northern European financial sector. And he is very familiar with the nuclear power plant that Areva from France and Siemens from Germany built on behalf of the Finns. After all, he is the chairman of the board of UPM Kymmene, one of Finland’s major forestry groups, which owns around a third of the reactor operator company.
In an interview with the FAZ office in Helsinki, Wahlroos appears so cheerful, as if the many bankruptcies and breakdowns on the construction site that have brought Areva into extreme financial difficulties had never happened. More precisely: As if they were giving him a quiet pleasure.
“It doesn’t matter to us at all that the construction was delayed for so long,” he confirms this impression. “We bought the reactor at a fixed price, for 3 billion euros. It would cost three times as much new today.” From Wahlroos’ point of view, things will get even better. “In previous years, energy was cheap anyway. Now it’s expensive. I’m sure that Olkiluoto-3 will be the most profitable power plant in all of Europe.” He lets out a small sigh of delight, then announces: “We’re going to make a lot of money from it.”
Wahlroos knows all about making money. Not only that he once did his doctorate with a doctoral thesis on pricing mechanisms and at the age of 28 he became a professor at the Helsinki School of Economics. Wahlroos – blond and tall, with an aristocratic appearance in a suit and pocket handkerchief – after a short academic career, he had a steep career in the private sector, founded his own investment company and managed many lucrative deals. This has made him one of the richest men in the north.
His mandates give an idea of how influential he is in the closely intertwined Finnish economy: in addition to UPM, he is also Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Sampo, the country’s largest insurance group; Until a few years ago, he held the same position at Nordea, the largest bank in Scandinavia. His Helsinki office is a five-minute walk from the Finnish President’s Palace.
A Finnish-Russian misunderstanding
The new power plant is the fifth in Finland. A sixth was also planned until recently. It should be further north. The Russian state-owned company Rosatom was to be the general contractor there. The project was canceled after the Russian attack on Ukraine, and Rosatom and the Finnish project company are fighting in court for billions in damages. Wahlroos suspects that cooperation with the Russians was doomed to fail from the start. “It was the project of local politicians and local companies. There are two large steel mills nearby that use a lot of energy. That’s why there was a lobby for this power plant.” At first, Eon was intended as the supplier, after the Germans pulled out, they fell back on the Russians. “It was really a crazy idea,” says Wahlroos.
However, he leaves nothing to chance about nuclear power per se. This position has a majority in Finland; It is not for nothing that the country will in all probability be the first in the West to put a repository for nuclear waste into operation. It should be the year after next. A good quarter of Finland’s energy requirements are currently covered by wood-fired power plants, around a fifth with oil and just as much with electricity from the reactors. “We need more of it,” says Wahlroos. “In the future, however, we will tend to rely on smaller reactors. There should also be one up there in the north to supply the two steel mills.”
The relationship with Russia is of particular importance for Finland. The two countries share a border that is more than 1,200 kilometers long. This has been a hot topic since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Finland, previously neutral, quickly and decisively sided with Ukraine and applied for NATO membership. This makes the close proximity to so much larger, more powerful Russia seem involuntarily threatening.
“We sold the Soviets cheap goods at high prices”
Hardly anyone in Finland is seriously worried about their own safety, claims Wahlroos. “Our military is one of the most powerful in Europe. We are a small country, but our field artillery is very good and most of us are reserve officers.” Wahlroos, by the way, with the rank of captain. But the fact that he is primarily a businessman comes through even when it comes to defensive capability. “Our generals often manage to buy well for little money,” says Wahlroos with visible appreciation. “We bought our Leopard tanks from the Bundeswehr and the Netherlands at a ridiculously low price.”
And how much does the war affect the Finnish economy? “When I was young, trade with the Soviet Union accounted for up to a quarter of Finnish exports,” says Wahlroos. “Since then, the importance has declined to well below 10 percent. We haven’t done much business with Russia in the last twenty years.” The special position the Soviet Union held for Finland during the Cold War was based on a 1952 bilateral trade treaty.
“We did it very cleverly,” judges Wahlroos afterwards. “We sold cheap goods to the Soviets at high prices. But we have always remained skeptical about them. In any case, much more skeptical than the Germans, who were quite naïve in this regard.” Finnish companies have never done any significant business with Russian oligarchs, says Wahlroos. “I have never received a Russian citizen in my office.”
A factory that produces energy
It is now paying off that Finland has never made its energy supply dependent on its neighbors to the east. The forest group UPM sees itself more and more as an energy producer in the future. “In a few weeks we will open the world’s largest pulp mill, which we built for 5 billion dollars in Uruguay,” announces Wahlroos. While a conventional mechanical pulp mill consumes a lot of energy, modern chemical cellulose production releases energy. “This factory doesn’t use natural gas, it produces it.” Together with an existing UPM factory in Uruguay, the new factory will produce a quarter of the country’s total electricity.
There are still protests against the factory. Environmentalists in Uruguay are extremely critical of the Finns’ reforestation projects there. Wahlroos of course takes the opposite position. The new cellulose mill will not only provide the raw material for paper and cardboard, but also renewable molecules for a variety of uses, most notably to replace oil-based petrochemical materials. “Near Leuna in Germany, we are building another factory where we will extract one of the main components of PET plastic, monoethylene glycol, from wood,” says Wahlroos. Many drinks are filled in PET bottles. “In the future we will be able to produce them, at least in part, from bio-plastic, no longer from fossil molecules, but from biological ones.
What could have become of Nokia
High-tech from Finland has changed the world before. The mobile phone manufacturer Nokia was one of the most successful companies in the world. Long before the first smartphone, however, the company had to overcome an existential crisis. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, she lost an important sales market for her electronic devices. And Björn Wahlroos was right in the middle as an up-and-coming financial manager. “We wanted to merge Nokia and the Swedish Ericsson group in the 1990s,” he says.
Twenty years later, could the two together have held their own against the challengers Apple, Samsung and Huawei, against which Nokia alone could do little in the 2010s? Wahlroos shakes his head. “Even then, it would have happened roughly the way it did,” he says. “Not even a merger would have saved the two from collapsing. Only the rise of Nokia from the year 2000 would not have been quite so wild for Finland, because the Swedes would probably have had the say in the merged group.”
Praise for the generals, blame for the politicians
Swedish is Björn Wahlroos’ mother tongue; like about 5 percent of the total population, he belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. A few years ago he moved his primary residence from Helsinki to Stockholm. In his opinion, there is an important economic policy difference between the two neighboring countries. “The Swedes realized 30 years ago that they shouldn’t extend the welfare state too far, and they set incentives for companies with a clever tax reform,” praises Wahlroos.
On the other hand, he has far fewer good things to say about Finnish economic politicians than about the Finnish generals. You have to know that as a high school student, Wahlroos was once very much on the left of the political spectrum. Even at university, however, he was won over by liberal economic and social concepts. He titled the first volume of his memoirs “From the barricades to the world of banks”. “Sweden has developed well, it’s less socialist than France today,” he says. “In Finland, on the other hand, we have had no economic growth for 15 years, our public finances are getting worse and worse.”
If you want to wallow in Finnish clichés, you won’t get far here. Wahlroos is involved in various foundation advisory boards, and recently also as a donor for his home country. But without much nostalgia. “We Finns have asked ourselves far too often which company could become the new Nokia,” he says. It’s all about building something new. “Today, the most successful Finnish companies have a lot to do with the world market and very little with sauna and elk hunting.”
According to his own information, reserve officer Wahlroos no longer goes hunting, and he gives a typical, pragmatic reason for this: “I stopped shooting moose and deer almost 30 years ago. I just didn’t like sitting out there and freezing anymore.”
#nuclear #power #plant #Finland #Controversial #investment #businessman #Björn #Wahlroos