The Underwater Lobbyist

Former Prime Minister of Finland Paavo Lipponen is now an official employee of the Russian government. In my previous post on Gerhard Schroeder and the war, I briefly mentioned Gazprom’s hiring of Finland’s former Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen as a “consultant” to Nord Stream (see previous blog post here). Today Kommersant has an interesting article elaborating exactly what Mr. Lipponen will be working on: the underwater environmental permits for the Nord Stream pipeline to pass through Finnish waters. As Grigory Pasko has reported, this is quite a dicey project, and a response from the Nord Stream PR department to this blog can be read here.