14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia is said to have threatened to leave its homeland Finland if the law that prevented companies from monitoring employee emails was not changed, as reported by a Finnish newspaper on Monday. According to the Nokia spokeswoman Arja Suominen, the company “has in no way threatened to move,” and the article was rather polemic. “It contains many mistakes and misunderstandings,” stated the spokesperson.
At the same time, Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen also denied the allegations, stating that the company hadn't put pressure on politicians to change the law. “I have not heard about such an ultimatum. I have discussed (the law) with many companies including Nokia, and I have never heard that they have made such a threat,” the Prime Minister is reported to have told national broadcaster Yle.
According to the paper, an unnamed civil servant had said that “Nokia lobbied very hard for the proposed law to be unanimously approved... (The message) was very clear: if the law was not approved, Nokia would leave Finland.” The article also stated that the company generated around 1.3 billion Euros’ (S$2.6 billion) worth of tax revenues, while 16,000 people in Finland were its employees.
The country currently has a law on the surveillance of electronic information that prevents companies from reading the emails of their employees, and it is considering loosening it. The paper states that Nokia began lobbying politicians to change the law after suspecting one employee of having sent classified information on new network equipment to the company's Chinese competitor Huawei.
Nokia has also filed a police complaint and started looking for evidence in its staff’s email correspondence. This way, the phone maker broke the law, yet the company was never charged as there was too little evidence to sustain the accusations.
The new law, called Lex Nokia, would allow companies to monitor the emails of their employees for information that includes the sender and recipient of the email as well as the sending time and the size of attachments. According to law experts in Finland, the law would blow away the privacy rights of the workers if it is voted through parliament later this month, as expected.