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Fitch affirms Estonia at A+ rating

Rating agency Fitch Ratings affirmed on Friday Estonia's Long-term foreign and local currency Issuer Default Ratings (IDR) at 'A+' with Stable Outlooks.

The agency has also affirmed the Short-term foreign currency rating at 'F1' and Country Ceiling at 'AAA'. The latter is common to all eurozone member countries except Greece, Fitch Ratings said in a press release.

"The affirmation of Estonia's sovereign ratings with Stable Outlooks reflect the country's near seamless transition to full membership of the eurozone starting on 1 January 2011, coupled with a more balanced economic recovery and the continued deleveraging of the private sector," says Paul Rawkins, Senior Director in Fitch's Sovereign Ratings group, informs LETA.

"However, income per capita is still relatively low and the economy continues to display a high level of volatility, while the risk of contagion associated with a potential Greek exit from the eurozone clouds the near term outlook," adds Rawkins.

Estonia has only partly complied with our recommendations : European Commission

The European Commission finds in its assessment report published on Wednesday that Estonia had only partially complied with concrete recommendations that were issued to EU countries for better co-ordinating their economic policies.

Estonia received a total of four recommendations last year from the Commission.

In terms of the State budget, Estonia has strayed from the course of keeping the budgetary deficit at the level of 2.1% of GDP in 2012. Instead, the European Commission predicts that the country’s deficit will be 2.6% of GDP, which is also above the deficit target set by the Commission in its spring outlook. The objective of reaching structural surplus by the year 2013 has been replaced with the goal of achieving a structural balance. Hence, Estonia has only partially adhered to the recommendations issued a year ago.

The same was the Commission’s assessment on the labour market policies. The Government of Estonia has taken a number of steps to lower labour taxes, but there are shortcomings in active labour market policy – the country has not addressed the issue of benefits for incapacity for work sufficiently: the number of people who need benefits has grown while there is not much success in bringing those people back to the labour market. The Commission reiterated its recommendations to Estonia in this area as well.

London taxi company sets sights on Tallinn

The London Taxi Company has sent an inquiry to the Economics Ministry probing the ground for expanding its operations to Tallinn, promising better quality of service than currently offered. 

Ross MacKrennon, international sales manager of the company, has sent the Ministry of Economic Affairs a request for the ministry's blessing to begin introducing the service locally, Postimees reported.

According to MacKrennon, London taxis are specially designed for the purpose and are therefore comfortable, secure and enduring. Besides supplying the cabs, the company is also proposing offering special training for drivers.

The company has been extremely successful in Azerbaijan's capital Baku, where it has significantly improved the overall taxi service and helped to reduced the number of pirate cabs, MacKrennon said. London taxis also operate in several other locations overseas, including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.  

Ingrid Teesalu

Karmen Pedaru for Gucci pre-fall 2012

Karmen Pedaru‘s (Ford) latest advertising outing for Gucci comes courtesy of the Italian house’s Pre-Fall 2012 campaign by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Just as the spring campaigns had turned overripe Karmen, looking ever resplendent as a redhead, returns for Gucci to enliven appearances and preview a very promising autumn. [Fashion Spot Forums]

Damien Neva
(Photography: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott)

Panorama City planned to open in Tallinn in 2014

The real estate development company E.L.L. Kinnisvara is planning to open a new shopping and entertainment centre Panorama City in spring of 2014, writes LETA/National Broadcasting.

The new establishment is planned to be erected between Tallinn City Centre and Lasnamäe district.

The approximate cost of the development is nearly a hundred million euros. The shopping centre is to extend to 77,000 square metres, 57,000 square metres of which will be lease space. According to plans, there would be nearly 200 different stores in the centre and 2,000 parking spaces.

According to the CEO of E.L.L. Kinnisvara Aldo Dapon, more than 55 per cent of the lease contracts have been concluded or are being concluded. The anchor lessee of Panorama City will be Rimi with a hypermarket store of nearly 7,300 square metres.

Another key partner of the shopping centre will be Apranga Group, the leading Baltic fashion merchandise company of Lithuanian origin. Apranga Group will open a total of up to 14 stores representing internationally renowned brands with the total area of nearly 4,800 square metres.

Estonians with cars in Finland targeted in tax blitz

Finnish police and customs are cracking down on people who have moved to Finland with vehicles but are not paying the country's steep taxes on car ownership - something that is foreign to Estonians.

On May 30, an extensive blitz took place near Helsinki. Fifty out of 100 drivers stopped on the basis of having a foreign registration plate were issued citations, and cars were confiscated in two cases, ETV reported.

The Customs Board says there are 50,000 cars in Finland registered in another country, most of them in Estonia.

As of May 1, 35,000 Estonians lived in Finland, according to the Finnish Population Register. Many if not most presumably drive their own vehicles, ETV reported.

Although re-registration is considered expensive, it is possible to get an exemption. However that only applies if Finnish customs is notified on the day of the move to Finland.

Ozeki Baruto honored in Estonia

TALLINN — Ozeki Baruto received an award from Estonia President Toomas Ilves on Wednesday in the nation's capital.

Baruto, whose real name is Kaido Hoovelson, was presented with the Order of the White Star, third class in a ceremony attended by Japan's ambassador to Estonia Hideaki Hoshi. The award is in recognition of services to the Estonian state.

In 2004, Baruto became the first sumo wrestler from the Baltic state. He was promoted to ozeki in 2010. After winning this year's New Year Grand Sumo Tournament, Baruto was a candidate for promotion to yokozuna, the sport's highest rank, but his 10-5 record in the Spring tourney ended that storyline. He had a 9-6 record at the recently completed Summer Grand Tournament.

Although there are no sumo broadcasts in Estonia, the 27-year-old wrestler's progress in each tournament is followed intently through the print media and the Internet.

Estonian cable television operator Starman selects SeaChange's open software for nationwide video-on-demand service

ACTON - SeaChange International, a leading global multi-screen video software innovator, today announced that Estonia's leading cable television and digital terrestrial television operator, Starman, will roll out a nationwide video-on-demand (VOD) service based on the open SeaChange Adrenalin video back office. Planned for subscriber availability later this year, Starman's offering to its digital cable households will include VOD, catch-up TV and nPVR.

From its primary operations center in Tallinn, Starman serves television, Internet and phone on a network that's currently available to approximately 45 percent of Estonian homes. Starman is the 28th operator in Europe to select SeaChange's next generation Adrenalin as a foundation for VOD services. Adrenalin is based on an open service-oriented architecture to deliver a television experience that scales to serve millions of assets to any video device across multiple network types, either deployed in a network or in a hosted model. Overall, SeaChange's back office customers across Europe serve an estimated 36 million subscribers on televisions, PCs, tablets and mobile phones.

Rallies in defence of Russian schools under way in Estonia

Rallies in defence of Russian schools are being held in Estonia today. The meetings in Tallinn and Narva have been called by the Russian School of Estonia association.

The participants are protesting against the authorities’ decision to make Russian schools teach in Estonian.

This is in breach of the European Convention for the Protection of National Minority Rights, which authorizes the use of one’s native language, along with the official language, in compact settlement areas.

Russian-speakers account for some 25% of Estonia’s population. Most of them have been denied Estonian citizenship, are subjected to unfair labour practices and discriminated against in the social sphere.

Ekho Moskvy   

Estonian islands : where time just rests!

AS I rolled off the ferry in the back of a rented people carrier onto the tiny island of Muhu, I was reminded of Caithness.

Today as the fog rolled around the house and closed down the view and opened the imagination, I recalled Muhu.

"Muhu," our guide Maarika explained, "is the island where time rests." I let the words roll around in my brain as I wonder what exactly that means. It might refer to a more leisurely way of life or a nostalgic look at village values or a part of Estonia where the influences of freedom and the west have not reached. It means, I came to believe in my brief visit, all of those.

Muhu reminded me of Caithness in three ways. First, when Maarika said that all too often people drove through Muhu without stopping on their way to the more famous, larger island of Saarema, I thought of all the times I had heard folks complain about visitors who lingered perhaps for a night here on their way to Orkney.

Secondly, both Muhu and Caithness have a handful of dedicated people committed to preserving and sharing the treasures of Caithness. The last connection was the most compelling personally, though hardly as profound as the others. Fish soup.

As a child of the prairies, fresh fish is a treat still associated first in my mind with exotic holidays. In an Indiana childhood, fish was all too often the deep fried, breaded squares dished out on Fridays at the school cafeteria. I think those squares are the American equivalent of fish fingers, but I am not curious enough to try tasting them.

Soviet collapse or Germanic reform ?

The latest issue of Diplomaatia, the Estonian foreign-affairs journal, published to coincide with the annual Lennart Meri conference in Tallinn earlier this month, is filled with great insight on the European crisis. My contribution on the euro's turmoil appears in the next post. But I want to draw readers' attention to other articles that offer some good perspective.

Ivan Krastev, head of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, a Bulgarian think-tank, compares and contrasts the collapse of the Soviet Union with the woes of the European Union.

He warns European leaders:

The Soviet collapse teaches us that just because the economic costs of disintegration would be very high, this is not a reason for it not to happen. To believe that the EU cannot disintegrate simply because it would be too costly offers only weak reassurance that the Union will continue to be stable.

Paradoxically, the belief that the Union cannot disintegrate, backed by the economists and shared by Europe's political class, is one of the risks of disintegration. The last years of the Soviet Union are a classical manifestation of this dynamic. The perception that disintegration is 'unthinkable' could encourage policy makers to try to push dangerous policies under the assumption that 'nothing really bad can happen' in the long term, and foster the idea that anti-EU policies or rhetoric might even be helpful in the short term.

The Soviet collapse is the most powerful demonstration that the disintegration of the EU need not be the result of a victory of anti-EU forces over pro-EU forces. More likely, it will be the unintended consequence of the growing dysfunction of the system and the elites' misreading of the political dynamics in their own societies. Reflecting on the Soviet collapse, the eminent historian Stephen Kotkin is convinced that the real question to be asked is, "why the Soviet elite destroyed its own system?" The Soviet collapse is the best demonstration that the rise of anti-integration forces can be the outcome, rather than the cause of collapse.

Tallinn's hotels expect a record summer in 2012

The larger hotels of Tallinn hope to post sales records in summer 2012, while some hotels have increased their prices by around 10% in a year, LETA/Postimees writes.

"While we thought in 2010, when the average occupancy rate of July was 95%, that it would be hard to increase that percentage, then last year the July average was 97.3% and now it seems that this record will also be broken this year," Viru Hotel communications manager Peep Ehasalu said.

The newspaper received a lot of similar answers when it asked from managers of hotels in Tallinn about forecast of the coming months. For example hotel Olümpia sales manager Vitali Makejev said that already they have 15-20 days this summer when the hotel's occupancy rate is above 90%.

The events planned in Tallinn for this summer also help hotels to achieve higher occupancy rates, the most popular of them being concerts of Lady Gaga and Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

Hotel Park Inn manager Kaido Ojaperv said that this summer for example the 43rd international physics Olympiad takes place in Estonia, with nearly 1,000 participants and in July the Tallinn Cup 2012 takes place.

Tourists have to take into account though that the hotels in Tallinn ask by 10-15% higher prices this year as compared to last year.

Juhan Tere

Estonia's water bodies among healthiest in Europe

A study released last week at the European Water Conference in Brussels showed that Estonia's rivers, lakes and coastal waters are among the healthiest in the EU.

The assessment of water bodies and water catchment areas indicated that slightly more than 70 percent of Estonia's water bodies are in good natural condition, Ministry of the Environment spokeswoman Brita Merisalu told news.err.ee.

The situation was found to be gravest in Belgium and the Netherlands, where estimates suggest that there are no water bodies that are in good natural condition

The study was based on data submitted in 2010 and focused primarily on ecological quality indicators such as aquatic flora, fish fauna and nutrient conditions in the water. It looked at rivers with basins larger than 10 square kilometers and lakes with a surface area greater than 50 hectares.

What sets Estonia's water bodies apart is that they are wild, undisturbed and extremely susceptible to any kind of pollution, which small water bodies cannot tolerate.

Immigration and emigration in Estonia increased in 2011

TALLINN - Figures from Statistics Estonia show that 6,214 people moved out of the country last year - 920 more compared to the year before. Meanwhile immigration figures increased by 899 and reached 3,709, Estonian Public Broadcasting writes.

Similarly to previous years, more women were leaving the country, while more men moving in, the data show.

The vast majority of Estonian residents to leave the country last year, 3,600, were headed for Finland. The second most popular destination was the United Kingdom, which received over 700 people from Estonia last year - a figure over two times higher than in 2010.

The majority of immigrants to Estonia came from Russia and Finland, each bringing in about 1,200 residents last year. Another 200 each came from the United States and Ukraine.

Internal migration figures remained stable in 2011, increasing by only 3 percent compared to 2010. In total, 38,544 people changed their place of residence between counties, cities and municipalities in Estonia. 

The migration figures are based on data from the Population Registry.

Police apprehend Finnish nationals for farming cannabis

The South Police Prefecture announced that it has apprehended two Finnish nationals suspected of raising 149 cannabis plants in a farmhouse in Viljandi County.

Last Thursday, police received a tip on cannabis cultivation activity at a farm in the Tarvastu municipality and immediately sent out officers to check the property. There they found a number of plant beds and pots containing cannabis, in addition to seeds, leaves and debris inside the house. 

The two men, apprehended the same day, were 28 and 29-years-old. One had already been penalized for cultivating cannabis in Finland, while the other had no criminal record. 

If convicted, the men could receive up to five years' imprisonment.

Ingrid Teesalu