The strange case of Anna-Maria Galojan

Anna-Maria Galojan, snaphot from her website.

Anna-Maria Galojan is a young estonian politician who's accused of stealing money from European Movement Estonia. The news was first broken by Eesti Ekspress, a weekly belonging to Hans H Luik. Ekspress reported that Anna-Maria had wasted that money for lux living, for example to the Armani-clothes. Soon the other newspapers followed. And all of them, Schibsted's Postimees and Hans H Luik's Päevaleht echoed: thief, money-smuggler. No-one questioned if what was said was in fact true.

Now, where did this kind of news come from? Anna-Maria had been CEO of EME and it was reported that the money was stolen during the time when she was the CEO. It later turned out that the reporter was Riivo Sinijärv, president of the same organization. Before that Riivo Sinijärv had been the ambassador of Estonia in Great Britain. He was asked to come back before his time because of being involved with the purchase of the house of the embassy, pocketing some money from the deal himself. Now he claimed that Anna-Maria had acknowledged her guilt by starting paying back some of the money she had "stolen". He said that she had also signed a paper proving it.

When me and Inno started investigating the story, it turned out that the money was in fact stolen before Anna-Maria became the CEO. As it turned out, she had no idea what she was in for. The tactic of mr Sinijärv was to use the media to intimidate Anna-Maria. He even went so far as to tell Anna-Maria go and kill herself.

The media, especially Hans H Luik's Ekspress let themselves be duped. At that time there was a media frenzy around our prime minister Andrus Ansip who's KGB-past was brought out - again. He was accused of using the dogs against the protesting university students in Tartu in 1988. He was quoted as saying: "If one gets bitten, he will never come to the streets again". Andrus Ansip would've had to step down if the papers had carried on and it seemed that they would. Anna-Maria Galojan was also a member of the Reform Party then. Strangely, Anna-Maria's "scandal" erupted at the height of Ansip-bashing. And suddenly the papers forgot everything about Näksip, as Andrus Ansip was called then, and dedicated all their energies to Anna-Maria Galojan. No-one was interested in finding out the truth or hearing what Anna-Maria had to say.
It was like a bizarre contest - who can kill her the quickest. Rein Lang, our judicial minister, also a member of Reform Party, is a good friend of Hans H Luik, so he was able to influence the media, like Andrus Ansip who is Schibsted's Mart Kadastik's buddy.

Finnish journalist Leena Hietanen has pointed out that we, estonians don't like russians. Well, we also don't like other nationalities, like armenians. Anna-Maria is armenian and i think that's one of the reasons why she was attacked so viciously. Because, lets be honest, she is not "one of us". No-one suspected Riivo Sinijärv who's lover Ulrika Hurt had been CEO of the European Movement Estonia before Anna-Maria. No-one even thought of the possibility that maybe it was Riivo and Ulrika who racked up those Armani-bills Anna-Maria was associated with.

One of Estonia's bright young prosecutors Kristel Siitam-Nyiri has been assigned to the case. I know Kristel personally because i was a prosecutor once, when i still tried to please people. And she's good. But the rumor has it that she's been talking to Riivo Sinijärv a lot lately. And Riivo Sinijärv is an influential man, he even got a medal from the president on our independence day.

We'll see how it goes. We'll keep an eye on the case.