Ownership in Finland ROAST | Sami Miettinen | Negotiator 63

Summary

The roles are reversed: Ville Tolvanen takes the host’s chair and interviews the channel’s own founder, Sami Miettinen, about ownership. The conversation begins with ownership as a social abstraction — Harari, and an Italian property purchase where a notary establishes which version of the truth prevails — and moves on to the structure of Finnish wealth: private wealth of about 700 billion euros, overwhelmingly in property, with two thirds of the stock exchange’s market value in foreign hands. The tension is that Finnish entrepreneurs sell too early, because there is too little domestic capital and too few follow-on financiers, and because the tax system penalises listing. Miettinen compares this with Sweden, where popular capitalism, the absence of inheritance tax and broader investment wealth let companies accelerate without giving up ownership entirely. The proposed remedies are equity saving for the young, more logical tax incentives, more professional board work and active domestic owners.

Chapters

• 00:00 — Options for transferring ownership, and dilution
• 01:22 — Roles reverse: the channel’s founder becomes the guest
• 02:22 — Owner, wealth and ownership get confused
• 02:47 — Ownership as a basic right of a liberal society
• 03:22 — Harari and ownership as a social construct
• 04:18 — Translink’s role in ownership arrangements
• 04:45 — Fee models in a share sale and in success
• 05:22 — A new owner into the company finances growth
• 06:54 — An Italian property deal and the notary’s truth
• 08:42 — Are Finns good owners
• 09:04 — Private wealth of 700 billion, mostly in property
• 09:45 — Two thirds of the stock market is foreign-owned
• 11:07 — Piketty and the ratio of wealth to GDP
• 11:57 — Italy: a wealthy people and an indebted state
• 13:00 — Emptying the jackpot and the short flight path
• 14:15 — The Swedish model would accelerate company growth
• 15:34 — Earned income 130 billion, capital income ten
• 16:21 — Subsidiary economy and home-market bias in a crisis
• 17:04 — Long-horizon ownership in central Europe
• 17:37 — Family firms, inheritance tax and succession
• 19:07 — Is Finland a society hostile to ownership
• 20:52 — The equity savings account and incentives for popular capitalism
• 21:39 — Swedish rent control and equity investing
• 23:47 — The exchange’s role for the economy and price formation
• 25:33 — Avoir fiscal and the discontinuity in tax treatment
• 26:51 — Listing increases the tax burden in Finland
• 28:40 — An entrepreneur’s under-payment compressed into one sale
• 31:00 — Tax day, envy and misread figures
• 33:09 — Anu Kantola’s book and the distortion of numbers
• 33:39 — How the sale proceeds are put back to work
• 35:26 — The Exit books and peer support for owners
• 36:35 — The board as an enabler of growth instead of a change of owner
• 38:21 — Internationalisation brings risk and personal liability
• 40:34 — A professorship of ownership at Aalto University
• 41:03 — Getting the young into equity saving early
• 42:11 — Tax incentives and Libera’s reform proposal
• 43:38 — Sami as owner, investor and entrepreneur
• 45:05 — A holding company, Translink and wealth in walls

Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Omistaminen Suomessa ROAST | Sami Miettinen | Neuvottelija 63. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.