Four Keminmaa officials avoided trial as charges expired

Four members of Keminmaa’s municipal executive board avoided trial after authorities could not serve them with summonses before the charges expired, Yle reports. The officials were unreachable for about a month in early 2025, while three other board members were convicted of abuse of public office in the same case.

The four have denied deliberately evading the summonses. Some said they were on holiday or did not answer calls from unfamiliar numbers. A legal researcher has questioned their explanations, Yle reported, but being unreachable is not a crime.

The case grew out of a dispute that began in March 2020, when the board met at the old school in the village of Liedakkala and decided to reprimand then municipal manager Mauri Posio. The Parliamentary Ombudsman later found the reprimand unlawful: Posio had not been heard before the decision, and it had been improperly kept secret.

Police investigated whether the reprimand was intended to harm Posio. Seven board members who took part in the decision were questioned, and the case was referred to prosecutors in 2023. Charges of abuse of public office were brought in early 2025, nearly five years after the meeting. With only about a month left before the charges expired, process servers were unable to deliver summonses to four of the accused.

A long-running dispute

Keminmaa had been struggling with workplace tensions for years. Posio said he had faced harassment and pressure, and believed the municipality’s political leadership was trying to force him to resign. Occupational safety inspections took place between 2020 and 2022. In late 2022, the Regional State Administrative Agency said officials had for years found cooperation with elected representatives burdensome. Several senior officials resigned.

One reported source of the conflict was compensation paid to a former municipal employee, Soili Rautio, who later became a member of the executive board. The municipality had dismissed her in 2016, but the Supreme Administrative Court found the dismissal unlawful and said she should have been placed in other duties. Posio considered an 80,000-euro severance payment too high, but the board rejected his position.

The dispute escalated after Posio declined to attend a board-organised meeting to discuss the problems. He had sought help from an outside expert, while the board wanted to discuss the issues internally. The board reprimanded him for not attending; the Ombudsman later ruled that decision unlawful.

Yle tried to establish what happened to the four officials in an episode of its Paikallinen skandaali podcast, made with the MOT programme and Yle’s local newsrooms. Some of the officials remain involved in Keminmaa local politics.