Finland’s International Development Minister has resigned after her ministry admitted it pressured a state company to drop charges against Greenpeace activists for boarding an Arctic icebreaker in 2012.
The minister, Green Party member Heidi Hautala, denied personally
ordering state-owned Arctia Shipping to drop the charges,
however.
On May, 1 2012, some 20 Greenpeace activists boarded an
icebreaker in Helsinki harbor, locking themselves onto the ship
and attaching banners to its sides, to protest oil and gas
exploration in the Arctic.
At the time, Greenpeace said it had boarded the Nordica
icebreaker, contracted by oil giant Shell, as it was preparing to
leave for Alaska.
Following the conflict, lawmakers accused Hautala, whose support
for Greenpeace is well known, and her ministry of ensuring that
no complaints were filed to the police.
Despite previously denying any links to the scandal, Hautala, who
is in charge of oversight at state-owned companies, acknowledged
Friday that both her assistant and a high-ranking ministry
official were responsible for dissuading Arctia Shipping from
filing charges against the environmental activists.
She then announced her resignation. The decision was approved by
Finland’s Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen, who said that Hautala
had “made the right decision,” local broadcaster YLE
reports.
Hautala said she had ordered her staff to try solving the
conflict amicably, but did not tell anybody to urge the company's
management not to file the complaint.
However, the senior civil servant at the State Ownership steering
office at the time, Pekka Timonen, contacted the Arctia
management on his own initiative.
“I heard via the ownership steering office that there was a
possibility of them making a criminal complaint,” Hautala
said. “Then there was a very general discussion about whether
there should be more debate and interaction between the parties.
But I never instructed Timonen on this issue.”
Hautala is known to have close links to Greenpeace and other
environmental NGOs. However, she denies that she wanted to
protect the organization.
“This has not prevented the reporting of a crime,” Hautala
said. “It is simply that as the owner, the state wants to
ensure corporate responsibilities are met. In this case corporate
responsibility also means that there should be communication with
different interest groups. This is not, in my opinion, at all
inappropriate or unusual interference.”
The minister insisted she would have taken the same stance,
regardless of which NGO had been involved. She said she had
resigned because she had provided misleading information about
what happened, but not because her decision was wrong.
Hautala has recently criticized Russia over what she says are
disproportionately tough measures against the Greenpeace
activists who tried to board Gazprom’s Prirazlomnaya oil platform
in the Barents Sea.
She sent her greetings and support to a Finnish activist, Sini
Sarela, who is now in Russian custody pending trial on piracy
charges as one of the 30 participants of the Greenpeace protest
on Sept. 18. According to Russian law, the charge of piracy
carries a maximum penalty of up to 15 years in prison.
Hautala had been international development minister since 2011,
and was previously a lawmaker in the Finnish and European
parliaments.