Satire · first published 2022-08-26
Marin as victim, Fortum on fire | Weekly Wiseguys, 26 August 2022
Sami Miettinen and Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 26 August 2022, in the middle of the Sanna Marin party-video row and Fortum's Uniper disaster. The panel splits the row into two separate questions: what a prime minister's private time is, and what the office itself demands. On the economics Miettinen takes apart the Fortum–Uniper structure — the eight-billion capital injection in January, the twelve-billion write-down, KfW's nine billion — and asks whether due diligence was ever properly done. It closes on a genuine free-speech case: the Helsingin Sanomat signals-intelligence trial and the state's incentive to over-classify.
Marin as victim, Fortum on fire | Weekly Wiseguys, 26 August 2022
Summary: Sami Miettinen and Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo’s Weekly Wiseguys, 26 August 2022, in the middle of the Sanna Marin party-video row and Fortum’s Uniper disaster. The panel splits the row into two separate questions: what a prime minister’s private time is, and what the office itself demands. On the economics Miettinen takes apart the Fortum–Uniper structure — the eight-billion capital injection in January, the twelve-billion write-down, KfW’s nine billion — and asks whether due diligence was ever properly done. It closes on a genuine free-speech case: the Helsingin Sanomat signals-intelligence trial and the state’s incentive to over-classify.
This is a summary on Neuvottelija AI. The episode itself is on Ivan Puopolo’s channel and is his — watch the original. The appearance is catalogued at neuvottelija.com/media, which is the canonical home of this content.
A note on reading this. Weekly Wiseguys is a tongue-in-cheek political panel, not a news broadcast. The speakers are right-of-centre commentators and politicians talking in their own names, sharpening for effect and joking as they go. This article sorts their arguments and marks who said what; it takes no position on who is right, and it does not reproduce the personal jabs. Speakers are named only where the recording itself identifies who is talking: the transcript carries no speaker labels, so uncertain passages are attributed to the panel or to “one of the guests” rather than to a name. The opinions are the speakers’ own.
The panel
Ivan Puopolo hosting, Tere Sammallahti and Sami Miettinen as the guests. Recorded in late August 2022, a week after the Sanna Marin party videos surfaced and while Fortum’s German subsidiary was burning through capital. The episode is therefore a contemporaneous record of two parallel crises — one a media row, the other a tens-of-billions balance-sheet event.
Two different questions that the row ran together
The panel’s most useful move comes in the first minutes. “Is a prime minister allowed to party” is not the same question as “what does the office demand”, and the episode is almost entirely about the second one.
The panel’s argument is structural: the premiership is a single seat occupied by one person at a time, so the demands placed on it should be close to inhuman — otherwise the selection mechanism does not work. Nobody suggests the distress is faked: “I believe Marin genuinely feels awful.” The claim is that the Lahti speech turned the holder of power into the injured party, and that this is a speech for therapy or for friends, not for the public a week before a winter in which housing costs were about to rise steeply. Ivan Puopolo marks the passage as his own by saying he will make a separate video about it.
Sammallahti’s addition is descriptive rather than accusatory. He mentions interviewing Marin on television in 2018, when she was still an unknown backbencher, and says a rise from a Tampere suburb to global celebrity in two years would blur anyone’s sense of reality. From that he draws a practical conclusion that applies to every party — and marks it as applying to his own side too, whose young hopefuls he says he has encouraged: before the premiership it would be good to have ministerial experience, a completed degree, a work history and preferably some experience of actually leading something. “You understand the logic of how everything around you works.”
The other recurring structural criticism is about how responsibility is divided inside a cabinet. The panel’s claim is that Marin’s standard answer — ask the responsible minister — is a new practice presented as an old convention. That is a checkable claim, and the episode makes it as a claim: previously, they say, a prime minister answered publicly for the difficult files of other ministers too.
Fortum and Uniper: where the twelve billion came from
The economic core of the episode is Miettinen’s account of why Fortum’s problem was not one number but a layered structure.
- Fortum’s Nordic business was improving its result throughout. That was not the problem.
- Uniper was a separate German company in which Fortum held control but into which capital had to be fed separately.
- In January 2022 roughly eight billion euros went into Uniper. At the time of recording, Miettinen says, it was still unclear whether the prime minister or the minister for ownership steering knew about it in advance — and neither had agreed to answer.
- In the arrangement negotiated with Germany, the state development bank KfW was to put in as much as nine billion, with further capital injections due from the start of October.
- The twelve-billion write-down did not, on his reading, yet threaten Fortum’s own solvency to the point of bankruptcy. What it did do was show up in Fortum’s interim report as a cautious hint that it might need liquidity support or state guarantees for derivative positions. “The tab is opening a little.”
This is the panel at its best: it turns a headline number into a structure. And it does so in a way that does not spare its own side — Miettinen turns the same question on Fortum’s management and asks whether due diligence was ever properly done on the Uniper deals, if fixed-price energy delivery commitments had been entered into unhedged.
He connects the same mechanics to much smaller players: retailers who had sold two-year fixed contracts at around six cents a kilowatt-hour had to sell at a loss once the spot price moved. Miettinen says his own supplier went bankrupt for exactly this reason and he had to switch contracts.
Power: an August that cost more than the winter
The panel raises a number that was new at the time of recording: the daily average power price in August 2022 was higher than during the worst spikes of the previous winter — in the middle of a warm August. The panel’s sense of scale is that a single thousand-euro megawatt-hour the previous winter had been a scandal, and now above five hundred euros was a more or less daily occurrence in August.
The thirtyfold figure for France is offered as a remark rather than a sourced statistic; read it as an order-of-magnitude claim.
The forecast is the panel’s own: one of the guests says the employment trend already shows a dip and that a recession next year is a realistic prospect. The advice is undramatic — save a little, prepare for outages, keep a modest home stock. “You don’t need to hoard.”
Late in the episode comes a nuclear counter-question that cuts against the speakers’ own preference: had the licence applications of the 1990s and early 2000s gone through, Finland would have three to five more reactors — and the price would still have risen, just not as far. And Olkiluoto 3 on its own, they say, will not bring the price down much; it mainly replaces what used to be imported from Russia. It is an unusually direct concession that one structural fix does not solve a price crisis.
On exports the panel makes an observation that turned out to be the right question: if every country starts restricting exports — Norway had just announced its intention — prices rise elsewhere and intra-European stability suffers. Miettinen notes that Finland could technically cut the Estonian link and lower its own price, and calls that an unfair way to play.
A free-speech case that is real
The most interesting stretch is the Helsingin Sanomat signals-intelligence trial, and it is interesting because the panel ends up defending a restriction on speech — the opposite of what the programme’s usual line would predict.
Puopolo raises the case himself, and his argument runs in two parts:
- If the published material genuinely is a security secret capable of putting Finland at risk, then restricting speech is justified. He explicitly separates this from prosecutions over individual offensive tweets: “that is nothing like this. This one possibly is.”
- The problem is the incentive structure. An official has an incentive to stamp rather too much as top secret, because no outsider can ever check whether the stamp was warranted. With the content invisible, the press cannot weigh its public importance — and where over-classification is likely and the information matters to the public, publication is defensible.
A guest’s counter softens this: his recollection of the story is that it also dealt with a location that was not generally known, and it left him with the sense that defence-sensitive detail had been exposed unnecessarily. Neither moves to the other’s position, and the disagreement stays in the episode.
Both then make the same point about leadership as they had about the prime minister: the editor-in-chief withdrew behind the privilege against self-incrimination instead of publicly taking responsibility for the work of his staff.
Where the panel disagrees
The disagreements are what make this episode worth reading.
- On the press. Puopolo treats Iltalehti and Seiska publishing immediately as correct journalism and criticises HS and Yle for hesitating — while crediting Yle for publishing in the end. He also says he made a video column about it for his own channel, and that nothing comparable could be published by a Yle journalist. Another speaker puts a counter-question that the episode leaves open: what would have happened if Iltalehti and Seiska had not gone first?
- On mercy. One of the guests suggests that after a hard week one could take a breath and show some grace. Puopolo rejects it flatly: taking a breath is not the press’s job.
- On over-classification. See above — same case, two readings.
- On what people are called. In the gender exchange one of the guests says outright that what people wish to be called is a matter of indifference to him, and that the rights of gender minorities must be protected. His claim concerns institutional language in early-years education, not the treatment of individuals. The episode makes that distinction explicitly, and it should be read that way.
Claims presented as claims
These are statements made in the episode, not verified figures. They are marked out here because in the recording they run alongside the checkable material:
- The cost of the security detail. The claim that an evening in a theatre VIP box costs taxpayers four to five thousand euros is the panel’s own estimate.
- How tax revenue splits by sex. One speaker refers to his own tweet claiming men pay a significantly larger share of tax, except in the 18–20 cohort (conscription) and among the over-eighties. No source is named.
- France’s thirtyfold winter energy price. An order-of-magnitude remark.
- 1,500 new subscribers to Puopolo’s channel off the back of the Marin row. The host’s own number.
- The claim that a prime minister has always previously answered for other ministers’ files. Presented as an established convention; the episode names no examples.
What survives
Two things hold up better than the rest.
The first is the Fortum–Uniper breakdown, done without hindsight, which turned out to be a substantially correct description of where the money was actually moving.
The second is the over-classification argument. It is independent of what anyone thinks of Helsingin Sanomat: if no outsider can ever check whether a classification was warranted, the classifier has a structural incentive to classify too much. That argument is not political, and it is the single best idea in the episode.
How the episode runs
- 00:00 — Opening: championship tickets and when a gift becomes a favour
- 01:54 — Marin’s Lahti speech and the rhetoric of victimhood
- 05:16 — What the office of prime minister demands of a person
- 09:49 — Private life, trust and security
- 12:45 — The August that cost more than the previous winter
- 14:16 — The “ask the responsible minister” doctrine
- 16:11 — A rocket rise without leadership experience
- 18:19 — Who published and who hesitated: Iltalehti, Seiska, HS, Yle
- 22:12 — Marin’s policy opening: forcing part-time contracts permanent
- 25:47 — Fortum and Uniper: eight billion in, twelve billion written down
- 28:19 — What the security detail costs
- 30:07 — European power prices and France’s thirtyfold claim
- 31:06 — Nord Stream, Lipponen and Western naivety
- 32:16 — Afrikan tähti, representation and “a world painted to taste”
- 34:45 — The gender debate, Orwell and de-platforming
- 39:17 — The claim about how tax revenue splits by sex
- 41:21 — Helsingin Sanomat in court: signals intelligence and over-classification
- 46:59 — An energy warning: recession, a home stock and outages
- 48:16 — The “the state’s VAT take stays the same” tweet
- 49:44 — The nuclear decisions of the 1990s and Olkiluoto 3
- 50:35 — Norway limits exports — the risk of a domino effect