Estonia’s Kaja Kallas said she had no intention to resign
FILE PHOTO © AP / Virginia Mayo
Prime Minister Kaja Kallas of Estonia said on Monday that she will not appear before two parliamentary committees, dared the opposition to call a no-confidence vote, and insisted neither she nor her husband had done anything wrong.
“The opposition will definitely come out with a motion of no confidence, in which case I will appear before the Riigikogu [Estonian legislature] to give an account. I will certainly appear before the relevant committees,” Kallas told the state broadcaster ERR on Monday morning.
In the same interview, however, Kallas said she would not attend the joint session of the State Budget Control and the Anti-Corruption select committees, scheduled for Tuesday. According to the PM, her husband’s business activities in Russia did not affect the Estonian budget, so the committee had no jurisdiction.
Kallas told ERR she would like to know “what exactly they are charging me with,” and looked forward to the opportunity to put the matter to rest with a public session of the parliament and a vote.
The scandal erupted last Wednesday, when ERR discovered that the prime minister’s husband, Arvo Hallik, held a stake in Stark Logistics, a shipping company that has continued to transport goods to and from Russia even after hostilities in Ukraine escalated in February 2022.
Not only was this a possible breach of EU sanctions against Russia, but Kallas herself has been a hard-liner on supporting Ukraine, insisting that “all business with Russia must stop.”
Speaking to ERR on Monday, Kallas acknowledged that she visited a client of her husband’s company in January 2022, and that a slideshow on display at the time may have mentioned a factory of theirs in Russia, but that since this was before the Ukraine conflict no one paid it any mind.
“Given all the companies I visit, there’s no way to say that if I’m presented with a slideshow, I’m somehow responsible for that,” Kallas argued. She also confirmed that Hallik had sold his stake in Stark Logistics on Friday, for what she described as “a peppercorn sum.”
Kallas also insisted that the loan she had given her husband went to his “financial holding company,” which had nothing to do with residential construction. However, Hallik had told ERR that the loan was intended for the building of a house in Kuusalu, near Tallinn.
According to Kallas, Estonia’s reputation has in no way been harmed, all of her foreign colleagues have been “very supportive,” and she saw no reason to resign. She also doubled down on the boycott of Russia, but said that “every company must find its own moral compass, in order to achieve this.”
Kallas took office in January 2021 as Estonia’s first female PM. This is her third coalition cabinet, with a 59% majority in the parliament. However, the latest opinion polls show that 57% of Estonians wanted to see her resign.
