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A country road in Mariehamn, Finland.
A country road in Mariehamn, Finland. Photograph: parkerphotography/Alamy
A country road in Mariehamn, Finland. Photograph: parkerphotography/Alamy

Finnish businessman hit with €121,000 speeding fine

This article is more than 10 months old

Anders Wiklöf fell foul of system based on severity of offence and offender’s income

A multimillionaire businessman has been hit with one of the world’s highest speeding fines – €121,000 (£104,000) – for driving 30km/h (18.6mph) over the limit in Finland, where tickets are calculated as a percentage of the offender’s income.

“I really regret the matter,” Anders Wiklöf, 76, told Nya Åland, a newspaper for the Åland Islands, an autonomous Finnish region in the Baltic Sea. “I had just started slowing down, but I guess that didn’t happen fast enough. It’s how it goes.”

Wiklöf, the chairman and founder of a €350m-a-year holding company, said the speed limit changed “suddenly” from 70km/h to 50 when he was flashed at 82km/h.

As is common in the Nordic region, fines for traffic infringements in Finland are based on the severity of the offence and the offender’s income, which police can check instantly by connecting via their smartphones to a central taxpayer database.

Under the Finnish system, a “day fine” is calculated based on the offender’s daily disposable income, generally considered to be half their daily net income. The more a driver is over the limit, the greater the number of day fines they receive.

The fact that Wiklöf had been fined twice previously for speeding was an aggravating factor. He also had his driving licence suspended for 10 days.

The businessman – whose name adorns the Wiklöf Holding Arena, the islands’ main sports stadium in the regional capital, Mariehamn – was fined €63,680 in 2018, five years after being hit with a €95,000 ticket for the same offence.

He said he hoped the fine – equivalent to half his disposable income over 14 days – would be spent usefully. “I have heard the government wants to save €1.5bn on healthcare in Finland, so I hope that my money can fill a gap there,” he said.

Finland imposes sliding-scale penalties for a range of offences including shoplifting and breaking securities and financial trading laws, on the principle that since taxation is progressive, fines should be also: the more you earn, the more you pay.

In 2002, Anssi Vanjoki, a top Nokia executive, was fined €116,000 after being caught doing 75km/h on his Harley-Davidson in a 50km/h zone.

Switzerland, which operates a similar income-based system, is believed to have imposed the highest ever traffic fine: Sfr3,600 a day for 300 days, or about €1.1m, for a Swedish motorist caught driving at 290km/h between Berne and Lausanne.

This article was amended on 7 June 2023. An earlier article said that Nya Åland was the main newspaper on the Åland Islands. The islands have two newspapers and Ålandstidningen is the larger.

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