There was no hint of the impending scandal surrounding a data breach at psychotherapy firm Vastaamo when the company’s owners sold their majority stake to private equity firm Intera Partners last year.
At the time the deal’s price tag was not made public, but tax and income data released to media outlets on Tuesday by the Finnish Tax Administration suggest that the buyout made millionaires of the family of owners.
According to the data, Ville Tapio, Vastaamo CEO at the time of the transaction earned 3.3 million euros in capital income and just over 74,000 euros in earned income. His mother Nina Tapio pocketed close to 1.3 million euros in capital income and had a pay packet from work amounting to around 35,500 euros. Meanwhile the family patriarch Perttu Tapio reported capital income of just under 1.2 million euros and his work-based earnings were 17,652 euros.
The younger Tapio was sacked from the post of Vastaamo CEO just over one week ago, when authorities and the new equity owners learned of a damaging data breach affecting tens of thousands of patients.
The Helsinki District Court also temporarily froze assets valued at nearly 10 million euros from the business family. Meanwhile Vastaamo board chair Tuomas Kahri, who stepped up to become the public face of the company following the intrusion, reported earned income of around 148,000 euros in 2019 and capital income of 15,264 euros.
Care crisis did not affect hefty paydays
Meanwhile 2019 was a year in which many private sector care firms weathered heavy criticism over deficiencies in areas such as senior care. However, the adverse publicity did not appear to affect the incomes of business leaders in the sector.
One of the top earners at private sector care companies in 2019 was former CEO of private care giant Terveystalo Yrjö Närhinen, whose salary reached close to 914,000 euros.
Apart from Närhinen, the tax data showed that top managers in the private sector earned significantly more than their peers working in public healthcare. On the public side, the biggest earner was Juha Tuominen, who earned roughly 195,000 euros as CEO of the Helsinki University Hospital District (HUS).