Finland has delayed passing the law implementing the EU Whistleblower Directive for a second time, the justice ministry informed on Friday.
The directive is meant to protect those who report breaches of the law, such as tax fraud, money laundering or offences related to public procurement, product and transport safety, environmental protection, public health, and consumer and data protection.
Companies with more than 50 employees, public sector institutions, authorities, and municipalities with 10,000 or more inhabitants are obliged to set up internal reporting channels. False accusations can result in fines for the whistleblower.
The deadline for implementing the directive in member states was set for 17 December 2021, a deadline most member states missed. However, in the months since, many have transposed the directive into local law.
A week before the deadline expired, Finland’s justice ministry published a statement saying that implementing the legislation would be delayed due to the directive’s requirements and many comments made regarding the proposal.
Now the implementation has been postponed a second time.
The directive is a budget law and “cannot be presented until the other big-budget laws have been submitted to parliament,” Juha Keränen, a ministerial adviser at the justice ministry, told the Finnish Broadcasting Company.
According to him, the amended proposal will be sent to parliament in late September.
A nursing home run by the family of Kim Keon-hee lost the first trial in a lawsuit seeking to cancel the National Health Insurance Service's disposition to claw back about 1.4 billion won in long-...