A number of former executives and employees of the telecommunications service provider Sonera are set to go on trial in the autumn in a case involving the alleged illegal tracing of the telephone records of Sonera staff.

   

Police believe that the Sonera managers and the company's internal security department used the company's telephone records to learn the source of a number of press leaks from within the company to journalists of Helsingin Sanomat.

   

The trial has been delayed by about a year because the police investigators say that they have repeatedly uncovered new evidence requiring investigation.

   

Prosecutor Markku Pohjanoksa says that the trial will involve about ten suspects and 100 victims. The alleged illegal activities stretched from 1997 to 2001.

According to evidence collected by police investigators, the affair was sparked by a request from former Sonera CEO Kaj-Erik Relander to find out who had leaked confidential corporate information about Sonera, and especially its subsidiary Smart Trust.

   

Relander approached the security department after an article appeared in Helsingin Sanomat on October 19, 2000, which revealed a number of management problems within Smart Trust.

   

Police say that the task was given to Juha E. Miettinen, the head of Sonera's security department.

E-mail correspondence uncovered by the police revealed that Miettinen wrote a message to Relander, and to the company's head of communications Jari Jaakkola in October 2000 saying that the internal investigators were looking for the source of leaks by examining the company's billing system.

   

Billing records contain information of when a call was placed, the telephone number of the person contacted, and the approximate location of the mobile phone base stations involved.

   

The Sonera managers appear to have been under the impression that employers are entitled to access the telephone records as long as the last three digits of the phone numbers called are not revealed.

   

The Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority and prosecutor Pohjanoksa say that under the law, such information records can only be used to clear up problems with billing.

Sonera managers learned more about the activities of the security department in February 2001. According to investigators, that is when Juha E. Miettinen told Sonera's management that he had irrefutable knowledge of the communications between a certain journalist and a certain manager.

   

According to police interviews, both CEO Kaj-Erik Relander and Sonera's head of legal affairs, Maire Laitinen, knew about the activities. Laitinen took up the issue with Miettinen, who nevertheless refused to disclose his investigation methods.

   

When Helsingin Sanomat approached Sonera to ask about the events of the autumn of 2000, Sonera hired an outside lawyer to look into the claims of illegal use of telephone records. The legal consultant did not find any evidence that the security department had done anything unlawful.

   

It was not until October 2002, when Helsingin Sanomat wrote about the suspected snooping, that Sonera filed a criminal report on the question.

Some of the suspects have said in their police interviews that they had complete confidence in Miettinen's professional abilities, which is why there was no closer scrutiny of the activities of the security department.

   

The Sonera managers who learned of Miettinen's activities in 2000 and 2001 told police that they had no idea that the actions taken by the security department were illegal. Relander has also denied any wrongdoing.

   

Miettinen, meanwhile, has told police that he was only following orders, and implementing established corporate practice.