The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) is to examine the communications that it had with the mobile telephone manufacturer Nokia during its investigation into suspected corporate espionage on behalf of the Chinese mobile networks manufacturer Huawei.
The aim is to find out what kind of information Nokia submitted to the NBI on employee e-mail during an investigation that began in April 2005.
Helsingin Sanomat reported on Monday that the NBI did not react to the information on senders and recipients provided by Nokia. Legal experts have said that the police should have suspected that a crime had been committed, because data privacy legislation in Finland says that employers are not allowed to dig up such information in such cases.
In a similar case at the beginning of the decade, in which Nokia suspected leaks to the Oulu-based company Microcell, caused a prosecutor to say that Nokia should have been prosecuted for snooping e-mail information.
In the spring of 2006 prosecutor Jukka Haavisto felt that Nokia’s action in the Microcell case had met the criteria of violation of communications secrecy. Haavisto did not press charges against Nokia, because too much time had elapsed.
The prosecutor also felt that police investigating the matter had neglected their official duty by not taking issue with Nokia’s snooping. However, he did not pursue any case against the NBI investigators.
As Nokia sees it, the NBI had asked the company to examine the log information of employee e-mail. Under the data protection law for electronic communications, an employer is not allowed to dig up such information when a leak is suspected.
In spite of the snooping by Nokia, no concrete evidence was found of a leak of corporate secrets to Huawei. Nokia was also unable to show that it had suffered any concrete economic harm in the case.
Nokia withdrew the request for an investigation over a year after the preliminary police investigation had been launched.
