When politics and business get tangled — a founder's reminder

A new episode of the Finnish current-affairs podcast Heikelä & Koskelo 23 minuuttia raises the corruption and influence-peddling investigations surrounding Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s inner circle, and contrasts them with SDP party leader Antti Lindtman’s publicly stated admiration for what he has called the “profitable socialism” of Spain’s PSOE. The episode’s political commentary is its own, but underneath it is a question that touches every founder — not just in Spain, not just in Finland.

The question is this: what happens when politics and business get tangled together? And why should a Finnish founder care, even when her own company has nothing to do with politics?

Heikelä & Koskelo treat the matter from a party-political angle. This article does not. This article asks what the genre of story teaches us about honest entrepreneurship — and why Finland has something special to lose here.

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Source: Heikelä & Koskelo 23 minuuttia — On Antti & Pedro’s billion-euro accusations, 12 May 2026 (in Finnish)

Why a founder should care, even if politics seems far away

The easy reaction to news in which a government’s inner circle is under investigation is to dismiss it as politics — “someone is up to something over there, none of my business”. For a founder, this is a mistake. The way any company is built has a direct line to how trustworthy its operating environment looks to outsiders.

A practical example. If you are a startup founder seeking an international capital partner in Finland, your company is not competing only on its product or team. It is competing on how the investor experiences Finland as a country — how predictable the legislation, how uncorrupt the public administration, how clear the rules. This is unfair, but true: the founder’s home country is part of the company’s pitch.

Finland does very well on this measure. In Transparency International’s annual corruption perceptions index, Finland is consistently in the world’s top ten. This is not a small thing. It is one reason a Finnish company gets capital on slightly better terms than many southern European competitors, why Nordic capital flows here a bit more naturally than to many other places, and why international partners trust contracts without separately built guarantee mechanisms.

This advantage has been built over a long time, and it can be lost faster than you might think. A handful of headlines about the rules not holding is enough for an international investor to start treating Finland as “southern-Europe-like” rather than “Nordic-like”. The risk is asymmetric: an individual founder cannot fix the damage, but the damage affects an individual founder’s terms.

Lobbying is not the problem — fuzzy lines are

A second easy reaction to Spain-type stories is to lump all influence into the same pile: “all politicking is dirty, I want no part of it.” This too is a mistake. Founders in every country have a full right to talk to decision-makers about their industry — and, in fact, a duty. If lawmakers do not hear from businesses, laws are made in a vacuum, and that serves everyone badly.

Influence becomes a problem when the line gets fuzzy. When friendships, favours, public procurement and private interests start sliding through each other so that an outsider can no longer tell where one ends and the next begins. Not necessarily in unlawful form — but in grey-zone form, where formally everything is in order but in practice the system’s legitimacy erodes.

This is the mechanism that causes long-term social damage. When a citizen begins to suspect that public contracts are steered toward friend circles, she begins to doubt the entire system. When a founder begins to suspect that a competitor gains unfair advantages through political connections, his own competitive drive suffers. When a foreign investor begins to suspect that a country has a grey zone, she begins to price it in as a cost. Everyone pays.

In Finland, lobbying has professionalised in recent years, and that is a good thing — a transparency register, openness requirements and the registration duty for parliamentary lobbyists are exactly what the system needs to do to keep influence visible. But fuzziness lives here too. Companies do well to recognise it in their own business.

What stays with the Finnish founder

For a Finnish entrepreneurship audience, this Heikelä & Koskelo episode is more a mirror than a news report. Spain’s situation is Spain’s, and the right answers to the right questions come from there. A Finnish founder can take away three things from this.

1. Finland’s trust is a competitive edge — don’t eat into it. As a founder you have a duty to behave in a way that keeps the country’s reputation predictable and uncorrupt. This does not mean only obeying the law. It also means observing the norms that are not written into law — for example, that public procurement is not pursued through political contacts. One founder’s odd contract shows up in the headlines as every founder’s cost.




2. Don’t build your company on the bet that political friends will play for you. It sounds obvious, but in practice the temptation is real, especially in small regional procurement games. A company that grows on the power of political relationships is a fragile company. It is fragile the moment the government changes, and it is fragile the moment someone starts looking more closely. Durable growth is built on the bet that the product is better, not on the bet that the phone book is longer.




3. Treat lobbying like open communication. If you have a message for a lawmaker, deliver it so that a public trace is left — through the open register, in writing, with reasoning. Do not arrange an informal meeting in which you hope to obtain a privilege. The first is influence. The second is something else. The distinction matters.

To close

The “billion-euro accusations” of the episode’s title are dramatic — and precisely because of the drama, attention often stops at the level of the scandal story. But beneath it is a quieter, more relevant story for the Finnish founder: trust is the only competitive edge that survives business cycles, generational handovers and changes of government. Building it is slow. Losing it is fast. And maintaining it is the responsibility of every individual founder, even when her own company is not in any sense moving on the political axis.

Socialism is a question of political systems, which Finland answers democratically in elections. Corruption is a different question. It does not pick a party. It picks whoever gives it room. The founders’ job is not to give it any.