Personal View: Why did my colleagues turn to crime?
Authors: Jorma Palo
Journal: BMJ (2004)

The news reached me in 2000 while I was on a German autobahn, driving to France for my summer holiday. My son called to say that Professor Urpo Rinne had been arrested and was under police investigation for transferring 10 million Finnish marks (£1m; $2m; €1.7m) of research money into his own bank account.

Not again, I thought. Just a year before, Professor Paavo Riekkinen was arrested because he had placed large sums of research money, given for the development of new drugs against epilepsy and dementia, in high interest savings accounts and had kept the income, about two million Finnish marks. He was sent to prison for two years. Soon afterwards his younger son, Paavo Riekkinen Junior, was found guilty of 23 different crimes also involving research money. His sentence was two years, three months. Both have already been released.




Under no circumstances should money be given directly to researchers




What had happened to my fellow neurologists? Rinne was professor of neurology in Turku, Riekkinen professor of neurology and neuroscience in Kuopio, and Riekkinen Jr a lecturer in neurology at the same university. Furthermore, Rinne's elder son Jaakko, a neurosurgeon in Kuopio, and his younger son Juha, a neurologist and professor at the positron emission tomography unit in Turku, were fined for crimes related to their father's misappropriations, such as using research money to hire nannies for their children.

Finland has only five medical faculties. I was professor of neurology in Helsinki while most of the crimes were committed, and I thought I knew my colleagues well. I first met Riekkinen and Rinne in the 1960s, when they both worked at the anatomical institute in Turku. We are of the same age and collaborated for decades in administration, research, and teaching. The unexpected news was so devastating that I collected relevant documents, went to several of the court sessions, and finally last autumn published the story as a book. How ignorant had I been, how little did I know!

The whistleblower was Kari Syrjanen, professor of pathology and dean of the medical faculty in Kuopio, who himself was caught for tax fraud involving research money he received from a tobacco company. He was fired and given a probationary prison term. Because he was aware that Riekkinen had obtained 100 million marks from drug companies but failed to manage the money properly he reported him to the police.

Syrjanen started a chain reaction. Riekkinen Jr was the next researcher to be arrested. He was found guilty of various frauds, for example making false expenses claims and falsifying signatures on legal documents. At age 35 he claimed not to know the university's administrative rules and considered the research money his own.

Rinne's misappropriations came to light during the police's investigation of Riekkinen Jr. As a well known specialist on Parkinson's disease he had received numerous grants for drug development. These were supposed to cover costs such as laboratory examinations and assistants' salaries. Rinne took all the money, even that provided through a private neurology foundation, and let the patients, communities, and university pay. The total sum is unknown, but the sum for just the last decade was equivalent to £6m, possibly the largest amount ever collected by one medical researcher. Earlier transactions have not been investigated.

The monetary loss to the university alone is estimated at £4m. One grant from a British drug company amounted to £0.8m, and another from a German company was DM7m (£2.4m). For handling these businesses Rinne needed 180 banking accounts, many in Switzerland, where he may still have some 15 million Swiss francs (£6.4m). He was sentenced to prison for fours years.

Riekkinen and Rinne had long clinical careers and held important posts at the Academy of Finland, where they were responsible for supervising the ethical status of scientific projects nationwide. These achievements make their motives puzzling. The explanation given by a psychologist was “squirrel syndrome”: hiding money as squirrels hide food. The squirrels' aim, however, is to survive, while the doctors had plenty of everything. The price they paid was high, because they lost both their status in Finland and their international reputation. I feel that such a loss could never be compensated by any amount of money—but probably they don't share my view.

Years before these events became public I initiated the foundation of a clinical research institute at my university hospital. Its main purpose was to channel and control research money, a function it has served well. I conclude that under no circumstances should money be given directly to researchers—a practice that may still be common in many institutions and companies. On the other hand, clever but arrogant individuals can always find loopholes in bureaucratic barriers, as our colleagues have shown—misplaced creativity, to put it mildly.