Helsinki police say that they have uncovered a large prostitution ring which has operated in the Helsinki region for about a year and a half.

   

Two men involved in the ring have been arrested for procurement, and more arrests are possible.

   

Seppo Sillanpää of the Helsinki criminal police said that the men who were arrested were the leaders of the operation in Finland, but that the whole operation is headquartered in Estonia.

   

"We know the leaders well, but we cannot arrest them with the evidence that we have."

The men now being held

in Helsinki are of North African origin, and one of the two has Finnish citizenship.

   

Police say that they were assisted by six or seven Finns who operated their own, smaller procurement ring on the side.

   

The organisation is believed to have had up to several hundred prostitutes working for it. The women were reportedly brought to Finland from Estonia, usually for periods of a few weeks at a time.

   

The group is believed to have used 27 apartments in the Helsinki area for its operations.

   

The leases for the apartments were signed by one of the Finnish operatives under an assumed name. In some cases the tenant would identify himself as an official of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs working on security questions.

According to the books

kept by the ring, the group used six apartments at a time.

   

The women working for the group would get between five and seventeen customers a day. Newspaper advertisements were used to attract the customers.

   

The records kept by the organisation indicated that the women were allowed to keep about a third of the EUR 51 fee paid by the customer. The rest were divided by the operatives in Finland and the ring's Estonian leaders.

Police have uncovered three major

prostitution rings in the Helsinki region in just over six months.

   

Seppo Sillanpää believes that the arrests have led to a slight slowdown in the prostitution business in the area.

   

He says that even cautious estimates would put the number of customers serviced by the three organisations at about 18,000 a year, and that nearly a million euros had exchanged hands.

   

"Probably the final sum is considerably larger", Sillanpää says.

   

The police started their investigation into prostitution rings after some of the women had been beaten, robbed, and blackmailed a few years ago.

The use of newspaper advertisements

to attract customers for prostitutes has sparked some controversy in Finland.

   

Janne Virkkunen, editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat, says that he sees no reason to refuse to run advertising for sex services.

   

Virkkunen says that it is impossible for a newspaper to differentiate between advertisements submitted by honest entrepreneurs and those involving procurement.

   

Under Finnish law prostitution itself is not a crime, but procurement is.