Helsinki diplomats pay only a fraction of their parking fines
Russia leads league table: 134 tickets, two paid
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The diplomatic corps in Helsinki can be a forgetful bunch, at least when it comes to remembering where they can and cannot park or how to pay their parking tickets.
The City of Helsinki's traffic wardens wrote out around 800 tickets for CD-tagged vehicles last year, but only 91 of them, or a meagre 11%, were actually paid.
The matter was reported in Wednesday's issue of the late-edition tabloid Iltalehti.
According to the newspaper, Russia headed the table with 134 fines issued.
Russian diplomats nevertheless paid up for only two of the parking tickets. This was apparently an improvement on the previous year, when none of the fines got settled.
Also scoring highly on the "inability to read No Parking signs" front were diplomats representing Vietnam (40), China (39), and Slovakia (35).
As in many other capital cities worldwide, Helsinki showed a substantial loss on unpaid CD-fines in 2008.
In this case the shortfall was around EUR 36,000.
Members of the diplomatic corps are not obliged to pay parking fines as such, but many countries regard it as a matter of honour that they fulfil their legal obligations, regardless of diplomatic immunity.
Helsinki's unpaid fines, by the way, rather pale by comparison with the situation in New York City. According to one 2006 article, the city was owed around USD 18 million in unpaid tickets, with Kuwaiti diplomats at the UN heading the field by a wide margin.
The New Yorkers are naturally less than happy with the situation, though as an Economist article pointed out a couple of years ago, the failure of US diplomats to pay London's congestion charge for bringing vehicles into the centre of the capital - they owed around £700,000 - somewhat balances the books.
Helsingin Sanomat
