The United States came close to adding business mogul and MP Harry "Hjallis" Harkimo (Movement Now) to a sanctions list in 2015, the leading daily Helsingin Sanomat (HS) reported on Sunday.
However, he was kept off the list after Finland signalled to the US that the sanctions imposed on Harkimo could make it difficult for the Helsinki ice hockey team Jokerit to operate. Harkimo was the majority owner of the team at the time.
HS's source for the story is Ambassador Daniel Fried, who in 2014 was responsible for the US State Department's sanctions policy.
"Negative effect on public opinion"
"There was a concern expressed to us that if he was put on the sanctions list, it would create problems for the sports team. I recall the idea that a shutdown of the team and the sports hall might have a negative effect on public opinion in Finland," Fried told Helsingin Sanomat.
Harkimo was elected to parliament as an MP of the National Coalition Party (NCP) in the spring of 2015. Three years later, he split from the NCP to form his own offshoot party, Movement Now. He remains the opposition party's sole representative in Parliament.
In 2015, Washington was imposing sanctions on associates of Russian oligarchs in response to Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula the previous year.
Fried told the paper he does not recall who or which Finnish agency conveyed the message about Finland's concerns. According to Fried, the concern was probably expressed to him in a face-to-face setting.
According to the ambassador, no one directly voiced the hope that Harkimo as a person would be spared from sanctions. Rather, he recalled, the Finnish argument was related to possible unintended consequences.
Niinistö, Tuomioja and Stubb deny knowledge
President Sauli Niinistö told HS that he had not been in contact with US authorities about the issue. MP Erkki Tuomioja (SDP), who was foreign minister in the spring of 2015, said that he had not previously heard of the incident.
After the 2015 parliamentary elections, NCP chair and former PM Alexander Stubb, who was then finance minister, does not remember Harkimo being considered for a sanctions list either. Nor does Päivi Kaukoranta, who was the head of the Foreign Ministry's legal department at the time.
The company that operated the Helsinki Arena (then known as Hartwall Arena) avoided sanctions for the same reason as Harkimo personally, HS reports.
Harkimo sold the ice hall to Russian-Finnish businessmen Gennady Timchenko and Roman Rotenberg in 2013 for 35 million euros. At the same time they announced that the Jokerit hockey team would join Russia's Kontinental Hockey League.
Last spring the sports facility closed down due to sanctions on Timchenko, an oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin. The team announced it planned to return to the Finnish ice hockey league.
The club's operations were largely funded by Norilsk Nickel, whose owner is Vladimir Potanin, another oligarch close to Putin. Last month Potanin was ranked by Bloomberg as Russia's wealthiest individual.
Harkimo, is a former competitive sailor and millionaire who hosted the Finnish version of the reality TV show The Apprentice. In May, HS reported that Movement Now was almost entirely funded by Harkimo personally.
Fried, a former US assistant secretary of state and ambassador to Poland, is now a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council, an "internationalist" think tank based in Washington, DC.