A Helsinki executive was fined EUR 15,000 at Tampere District Court on Friday for a speeding offence. The police officers who stopped the man had ordered a fine of EUR 79,860, which he had appealed against, taking the matter to court.

   

Fines in this country are linked to after-tax income, and there is no upper limit. Furthermore, the police now have direct smartphone access to the most recent available tax return information, so the culprits' earlier kerbside economies with the truth about their gross earnings (once regarded as a Finnish national sport) are rather more risky these days. In this instance the fine imposed by the police was set at 20 days' income, based on tax records for 1999.

   

The Tampere court heard that the man's income had declined appreciably in the following year, so reducing the price of an individual "day". In addition the court reduced the police's 20 days to 15 days.

   

The man in question was caught in Lempäälä, south of Tampere, in the summer of 2001. He was driving at 93 km/h (c. 58 mph) in a 60 km/h (37 mph) zone.

The issue of income-related speeding fines

is a vexed one, though many Finns still argue that the long-established "pay according to your means" arrangement is ultimately more egalitarian than a flat-rate for everyone, which would mean speeding fines are little more than a gnat-bite to the wealthy.

   

However, with the tech stocks boom and a rash of new "windfall profits" millionaires, speeding fines went ballistic two or three years ago.

   

This prompted a certain amount of discussion at home as well as a number of splashy "Flying Finn" and "Highway Robbery" headlines in the international press. Some people here took this as bad PR for Finland, or "Fineland" as one Australian newspaper described it.

Dotcom millionaire Jaakko Rytsölä

, for instance, collected two colossal tickets in quick succession and at just the wrong time. One looked like costing him FIM 300,000 (just over EUR 50,000) for a traffic violation in 2001. NHL hockey star Teemu Selänne was slapped with a bill of similar dimensions for reckless driving after an accident in 2000. In a third notorious case, the 23-year-old heir to a family fortune took a EUR 40,000 hit for driving his BMW at 200km/h through a radar trap on the motorway between Helsinki and Hämeenlinna. The speed limit was 120km/h.

   

Rytsölä's shares and options went through the floor when the dotcom bubble burst, and after taking the case to court he wound up paying a tiny fraction of the original fine, only to see the Court of Appeal abruptly overturn that ruling and increase the sum once again to something like EUR 17,000. Rytsölä 's financial fortunes continued to wane; he was declared insolvent in March of last year.

   

Selänne, meanwhile, grumbled bitterly about his own bust, but despite his obvious popularity as a sporting icon there were no deafening public cries of protest about the case, at least not in Finland.

Both of these monster fines

- and indeed the latest example above - nonetheless pale beside the EUR 116,000 speeding ticket (no, this is NOT a misprint) handed out in October 2001 by roadside police to Anssi Vanjoki, a senior Nokia executive and board member.

   

Vanjoki, who is also an enthusiastic biker, was clocked at 75km/h on his Harley-Davidson in a 50km/h limit zone in Helsinki, and his net income was assessed on 1999 figures at a cool FIM 35 million, or EUR 6 million. He was given a fine of 14 days at FIM 47,000 per day.

   

The doughty Mr. Vanjoki admitted his offence but protested that tax return figures for 2000, released only days after the incident, would have shown an appreciably smaller net income (his Nokia stock options had crashed along with other tech share values), and that things got even worse in 2001, the actual year of the offence. He took the case to court. Eventually he paid a fine of just under EUR 6,000, calculated on his average net income over three calendar years.