Sonera investigators: Relander knew of snooping in late 2000

Former CEO denies knowledge of illegal activities

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According to the nearly 2,000 pages of police investigation material into the case of suspected violation of telephone privacy of employees of the telecommunications service provider Sonera, the company’s deputy CEO Kaj-Erik Relander and at least one other member of the company’s top management were aware of the activities of the company’s security department.
      Investigators said that Relander, who faces charges of aggravated violation of communications privacy, knew of the tracing of employee telephone calls already two years before the scandal came out in public.
      An e-mail message sent in October 2000 by the head of the security department Juha E. Miettinen to Relander and the company’s head of communications, Jari Jaakkola, suggests that the security department was looking for the source of a press leak.
     
At the time, an intense power struggle was going on inside Sonera, and police say that their investigation shows that Relander had suspicions about Harri Holmen, head of the subsidiary Sonera Plaza, Pirjo Kekäläinen-Torvinen, who had dealt with the auctions for UMTS licences, and Harri Vatanen, former head of the subsidiary SmartTrust.
      "I have initiated an investigation aimed at finding out the source of information linked with the story in Helsingin Sanomat concerning Harri Vatanen ... Not all information has been transferred yet from the exchanges into the billing systems for October 17 - 19, which means that we will have access to the information on Monday next week (23.10) at the earliest", wrote Jaakkola in the e-mail.
      Under police interrogation, Relander said that he had assumed that security chief Miettinen was operating within the law.
     
The billing systems reveal the telephone numbers of those that a particular subscriber has been in contact with, as well as the base station that a mobile telephone has been closest to when a call was made. Telecommunications operators are obliged under the law to keep such information confidential.
      In a conversation with Jaakkola and Miettinen, Relander - who later rose to the rank of CEO - had expressed concern that corporate secrets were being leaked outside the company. In an effort to plug the leaks, Sonera’s security department began tracing calls between company telephones and outsiders.
      Relander said that he was especially concerned at the possibility that Sonera might lose its subsidiary, SmartTrust.
      According to the investigation, the security department focused on people with access to information on SmartTrust, which was then working on making it easier to use a mobile telephone as a method of payment - an activity which was seen as very lucrative at the time.
     
According to investigators, Miettinen had asked Jaakkola to name the journalists who wrote about SmartTrust. The request came after an article appeared in Helsingin Sanomat in October 2000 detailing problems experienced by SmartTrust.
      A few days later, Miettinen sent Relander and Jaakola an e-mail, saying that he had traced the telephone records of Teija Sutinen and Marko Junkkari, both business journalists at Helsingin Sanomat. The two had written a story about SmartTrust that had worried Sonera.
      Miettinen wrote in the e-mail that no contacts with Sonera were found in the journalists’ telephone records. He also said that he would continue to investigate "other possible individuals and information from the Helsingin Sanomat telephone exchange".
     
The exchange relays all calls to and from Helsingin Sanomat journalists. It suggests that in addition to mobile phone calls, the Sonera investigators tried to dig up call information from the fixed-line phones of Helsingin Sanomat journalists.
      However, the police investigation did not prove conclusively that call information from the Helsingin Sanomat exchange had been uncovered, or who might have been affected. As Sonera was never responsible for the operation of the newspaper’s telephone exchange, it is considered unlikely that the Sonera security department would have acquired any information from there.
      However, the fixed line telephone information and e-mail traffic of nearly 50 Sonera employees was investigated.
     
Those facing charges of violating communications privacy have a completely different view of the significance of the e-mail messages sent by Miettinen.
      Miettinen feels that the messages prove that the company’s top management was quite aware of how the matter was being investigated.
      Relander says that he does not recall reading the e-mails, which he considers a part of quite normal reporting of events. He says that nothing suggests that anything inappropriate would have taken place.
      Jaakkola also does not recall the exact content of the messages. Both Relander and Jaakkola say that they assumed that Juha Miettinen’s investigative methods were legal.
     
One former Sonera employee says that Relander planned to set up an internal espionage system in the spring of 2000 to root out his opponents in the company.
      In a police interview, the former employee said that the system was to involve "agents coordinated by Relander and a technical espionage system involving e-mail, among other things".
      Relander has denied any such intentions.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Sonera offers compensation to targets of snooping (25.5.2004)
  Sonera phone scandal: Police submit investigation material to prosecutors (24.5.2004)
  Allegations of illegal tracing of phone records at Sonera to go to trial in autumn (8.4.2004)

Helsingin Sanomat