Publication, “EESTI VABARIIGI RAHA” 1919 to 1940 and 1991 to 2010 complete.
By Allan Tohv. Softcover – 50 placards included
ISBN number: 978-9949-30-126-3
Estonian Language first print, 2011.

From the author of several publications focusing on the coins and banknotes of Estonia, Allan Tohv, a leading expert on the subject, has released a new informative and practical publication which includes illustrations of all the coins and paper money issued by the Republic of Estonia since independence in 1918.

Concentrating specifically on the illustrations, the collection of images are brought together in a functional tri-folder presentation whose format cleverly divides these issues from the first and second periods of Estonian nationhood. On one side of the folder, the coins and banknotes from Estonia’s first era of independence which covers the marka coins issued in 1922 right up to the last krooni & senti coins issued in 1939. The placards are cleverly printed (and exactly aligned) on both sides in full color and illustrating obverse and reverse images in clear depictions. Also included are images of Estonia’s first payment notes issued in 1919 (50 Marka) fidelity notes, treasury notes (1919 – 1923) - the pre-cursor to eventual banknotes issued by the Bank of Estonia beginning in 1928.

The second side includes both the circulation and commemorative coins issued by the Bank of Estonia since the restoration of Independence in 1991. The first coins, also dated that year are illustrated as well as the first silver commemorative coins issued for the 1992 Summer Olympics. Images for the gold and silver collector coins dated 2010 which mark the introduction the Euro are also included.

Estonia’s beautiful and colorful banknotes highlighting prominent Estonian personalities were introduced in June 1992 (with notes dated the year before) in denominations from 1 to 500 Krooni. This series along with a revised series including the 25, 100 and 500 Krooni notes continued as Estonia’s legal tender until the introduction of the EURO single currency in January 2011. Images for the series of banknotes, those dated 1991, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2006 and 2007 are all comprehensively included.

Each side of the folder includes a listing of the placards with a brief description and their official mintage or note issue numbers. The placards measure 20 / 14 cm. and are printed on high quality white cotton paper. Each placard is suitable for framing or mounting. 50 placards in all are included. Many of the images included are taken from Mr. Tohv’s own extensive archives and depict some very rare and hard to find examples of Estonia’s short-lived currency notes only seen at the Bank of Estonia’s currency Museum. The notes are also depicted in their actual dimensions and full color.

A must-have for collectors of Baltic coins or currency, this publication is extremely useful with excellent reference images. For more information on this and other publications offered by Allan Tohv, please contact: allant@uninet.ee

While currently immigrations control is implemented equally to all foreigners, the amendments create more flexible possibilities for bringing persons who add value to Estonia. It also simplifies the stay of family members of foreigners in Estonia.

The law amendments enable Estonian companies to employ a top levels specialist from abroad in a matter of days and the foreigner can apply for a residence permit for it while already being here.

One of the conditions for the simplified rules is that the company has to pay the specialist at least two times the Estonian average wage.

The law also enables foreign students to work while studying in Estonia and foreign students who graduate from a university here can work in Estonia after graduation too

Toomas Hõbemägi

TALLINN

The holiday is always held on the night of June 23 and is meant to mark the longest day of the year - when the sun only sets for a few hours and the night never gets much darker than twilight.
Traditional foods include Jani cheese, (usually lots of) beer and grilled meats. The holiday is known as Jaanipaev in Estonia, Jani in Latvia and Jonines in Lithuania. Midsummer Eve is a beautiful summer evening filled with mysticism, love, flaming bonfires and feelings, dancing and music, “swinging songs” and folk games. All of that can be experienced at the Estonian Open Air Museum on the night that is the most important holiday of the year for Estonians.

The procession to light Midsummer Eve’s bonfires will start at 19:00 at the main gate. The dance stage will be open for anyone who wants to shake a wicked leg and enjoy dance music. The visitors will see performances by Pritsu Brass, the brass band of Tallinn fire department, and everyone’s favorite, the Untsakad band. As midnight draws near, Twilight will offer his hand to Dawn, and the lightest night of the year will be waiting.
The Kerase Stage will be given over to young folk musicians. The stage will see Estonian girls of the “Midrid” band and Finnish lads of the “Haaga Folk Machine” group. The Midsummer Eve bonfire will be ablaze, and there will be plenty of food and drink.

In between there will be games for visitors to show their strengths and dexterity: weight lifting in the wake of Georg Lurich, climbing the “sweet tree,” tug-of-war with sticks and “Gipsy wrestling.”
In 2013, Rocca al Mare summer manor is celebrating its 150th anniversary. It was in 1863 that baron Arthur Girard de Soucanton chose this beautiful place to build his summer retreat, and the manor surrounded by the romantic park became a favorite spot for culture-loving holidaymakers for decades. Helene Pond was named after Catarina Helene Claudine, the baron’s daughter. On Midsummer Eve this spot will be waiting for any loving couple who would like to paddle away from the festive revelry and make, or renew, vows of love on the quiet pond!

The video installation “A Story with no Beginning or End” (2011) to the music by Kulno Malva was created by artist Liisi Reitalu, to be performed during the year when Tallinn was the cultural capital of Europe and was projected on the roof of the Sassi-Jaani farmhouse on dark winter nights. This time the installation can be viewed in Kolu Inn, starting at 20:45, 21:45 and 22:45.

At Kolga Farm yard the youngest family members to have great fun and put their strength and dexterity to test, playing old Estonian folk games and participating in strength contests. A life-size windmill game table will also be set up for players to show how smart they are.

At Sepa Farm, swinging on the large village swing was one of the favorite pastimes of the young. To prevent anything bad from happening in the process, folks would bring gifts and “bribes” of butter, eggs and colorful ribbons to the swing and the swing-master boys. The housewife will tell the visitors about swinging traditions and teach them to weave a simple ribbon.

For Estonians, this is tied to Estonia’s victory during the War of Independence and the securing of a free and independent state. For Midsummer Day, there are the official public holidays, allowing the whole nation to prepare to party the entire night.

Moscow

On the first day of his trip, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church visited the Linda Monument in Tallinn and layed flowers at the World War II Bronze Soldier Monument. "Doubtless, the visit by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church to Estonia will play an important spiritual role for Orthodox Christians who live in this country," Father Alexander said.

Alamäe said that at the time when the competing bidder by the name of Iglu made its bid some of the employees listed by Iglu as service providers were still working for Nortal.

“I don’t want even to talk about it, it’s like washing dirty laundry in public,” said Alamäe. “It’s so personal and nasty. One day you trust people, on the next they stab you in the back,” he added. Äripäev has learned that a large number of employees have left or are leaving Nortal. It was claimed that the company was laying off the whole personnel department.

According to Alamäe, three employees of the personnel department have left the company, but said that it was a consequence and not a cause. Speaking of the exodus, Alamäe said that Nortal has been losing middle managers also before, but this time some of Nortal’s IT people were participating in a competing tender at the time when they were still employed by Nortal.

Accordign to Alamäe, Iglu has been poaching Nortal’s employees and has also offered its services to Nortal’s customers. Alamäe says that Iglu has approached about 30 employees of Nortal, most of whom are now employed by Iglu.

In the last few months, Nortal has lost about 40 employees, most of them to Iglu. Iglu Ltd belongs to Mart Nõmper, attorney at law of law firm Rödl  & Partner. One of the company’s board member is Kaarel Kuddu who is a former employees of Nortal and left the company in January.

Nõmper refused to comment the relations between Iglu and its customers, referring to confidentiality agreements. He did not say whether Iglu has participated in tenders by offering services of employees who were still employed by Nortal. Nõmper said that he had no information that Iglu has been using people who are being employed by Nortal.

“You have to ask Nortal about it, I don’t have such information,” said Nõmper.

Toomas Hõbemägi

“The current system was good 10 or 15 years ago, but now it is past its due date and only serves the interests of large foreign corporations, banks and telecom giants”. He added that Estonians are forgetting that while the Estonian pension system collects tens of millions of euros every year, foreign-owned banks are siphoning this money away from Estonia instead of investing it in Estonia.

“We have about 640,000 people who have invested in second pillar pension fund. It is crazy and unsafe to invest these funds in some far market such as Bulgaria at the time when we are borrowing money from abroad.

Kasela said that if Estonia listed some of its larger state enterprises such as Eesti Energia, it could activate the local stock market and convince fund managers to re-invest the funds in Estonia.

“No US law protects Estonians, which is why we ourselves must demand from our MPs to find solutions that protect our privacy,” writes Tuisk, adding that the US government has not shown itself as the defender of online freedom.

“If Estonia decides to continue in the same way as before in building up its e-state, without adjusting to the implications of the NSA scandal in the US, we would be nothing else than a US satellite on the Internet. We would have to accept everything that it entails, without being able to influence these processes. As citizens we must not forget that no-one else will fight out battles for Internet freedom. It is the future of the information society that is at stake, but the solutions are at our hands.”

Toomas Hõbemägi

“I am glad that this time an investigation of the circumstances, and punishment of the culprits, has been done quickly,” said Ilves.

He stressed that the internal elections of one party and Estonia’s e-elections are, technically, two different things. “In this case, only one’s own party and party members were cheated upon; we could say that others didn’t suffer,” Ilves said. He also noted that many people would want him to simply just condemn the Reform Party, to brush the matter under the rug, but that would be the “easy way out.”
“One could say that this is an internal problem of one party: maybe it will draw attention away from us and everything will pass. I don’t think it will pass. We have to learn from the event and come out of the problem cleaner than before,” said Ilves.

Vote rigging scandal
President Ilves announced last week the convening of the chairmen of Estonian parties - those which are represented in the parliament - at the Kadriorg Palace for a meeting to discuss the domestic political situation. This meeting was spurred on by the recent scandal where the manipulation of the votes had taken place in the May elections of the Reform Party’s board.

On June 5 the Reform Party board expelled veteran politician and MEP Kristiina Ojuland from the party, accusing her of being involved in manipulating votes to get elected to the board. Ojuland has denied any wrongdoing.
The party’s Laane-Virumaa county organization development manager Taimi Samblik, who admitted to manipulating the votes, resigned before she could be expelled. Last Friday, the Viljandimaa county organization development manager of the Reform Party Ott Kukk also resigned from his job, as well for casting votes in someone else’s name in the party’s internal elections.

Ojuland said after the party board meeting that she was disappointed by the board decision and specified that the reason for her being expelled was harming the reputation of the party. Ojuland, who has denied involvement in cheating with the votes, said that she hasn’t yet decided upon turning to the court to clear her name, but said she would be consulting with lawyers.

Speaking on ERR radio, Tallinn Mayor and head of the opposition Center Party Edgar Savisaar said he believed that the situation is not a sweeping crisis of political culture, but a crisis of the ruling coalition.
“Ratings are down for the ruling parties, not the opposition. That means the public wants to see the government switched out and political change,” Savisaar said.

Suspicions confirmed
The head of the working group formed for the investigation, Reform Party MP Vaino Linde, told Postimees that the materials and testimonies they had collected confirmed the suspicions that Samblik, European Parliament member Ojuland and Laane-Viru County Governor Einar Vallbaum were connected to the voting fraud that was committed in the elections of the party board in May, as well as in another scandal in 2011.

Ojuland admitted that she had paid party membership fees for 39 people, which gave them the right to participate in the party board elections, but denied wrongdoing. Samblik admitted that she voted for other people, claiming that she did so on the orders of Ojuland, which Ojuland claimed was a lie.
Samblik has also claimed that Ojuland and Vallbaum recently approached her, offering her a year’s salary and a month-long trip to Tenerife to wait for the scandal to blow over, in return for taking the blame wholly on herself.
Vallbaum has denied any involvement in the matter.

The court of honor of the party said it did not have reason to doubt the legitimacy of May election’s results, reports err.ee. The party said damage had been done to the reputation of Estonia’s pioneering e-election system, although the party’s internal voting system is completely separate, allowing members to log in even through Facebook.

Prime minister gives warning
Estonian Prime Minister and Reform Party chairman Andrus Ansip confirmed on June 7 in an interview with national radio that manipulation of votes had taken place in the elections of the party board. He said earlier, on May 31, in a similar interview that there was a confession from a party member about manipulating votes at the elections of the party board. “The secretary general of the party has a written explanation from one specific person where the person admits to committing these acts. And the person refers to having done it at someone else’s will and knowledge,” said Ansip.
The prime minister was initially unwilling to reveal the person’s name, since the party had formed a commission to investigate the affair.

He added that he knew of over 30 suspicious votes which correspond to the same pattern which can refer to use of a false identity.
Eesti Ekspress wrote on May 30 that in the Laane-Virumaa county in north east Estonia, several elderly pensioners joined the Reform Party a few days before the elections of the party board in 2011, who later participated in the board’s elections via the Internet without knowing about it.

“Though the work looked like a typical utility line construction to bystanders, it was not among the simplest ones for the constructor in this site,” said Erkki Suurorg, member of Nordecon AS Management Board. “It was quite a challenge to install the sewer to a depth of 3.5 or 4 meters in these very cramped conditions, where the already functioning utility lines were running both in parallel and crosswise and the limestone layer was at a depth of half a meter here and there. The work was nevertheless finished on time and no compromises were made in terms of its quality.”

Erkki Suurorg says that he wants to thank the residents of Kivimurru Street and local businessmen for their patience and understanding, considering that the construction work and the closing for traffic caused inconvenience to them.

Within the construction project of Kivimurru Street, a new rainwater sewer was built from Lasnamäe Street to Peterburi road. A total of 935 running meters of rainwater pipes were mounted, consisting mostly of pipes with a diameter of one meter. In addition, the entire 8 metre wide street got a new asphalt pavement and the sidewalks were also restored. The crossings at Lasnamäe Street and Pallasti Street were renovated too.

The construction work of the rainwater sewer at Kivimurru Street was launched in September last year and was finished this May. The contractor was Tallinn’s Municipal Engineering Services Department and owner supervision was performed by Teede Projektijuhtimise AS.

Tallinn likened those plans to Fon, the crowdsourced WiFi network that encourages consumers to share their hotspot with others. The idea was to build out a shared network infrastructure, and then piggyback TV and telephony services on top of that, he said. However, there were two problems with that plan:

“We were in the midst of lawsuits with major content producers after having done KaZaa, so we dropped the TV idea, and (…) we found out that all the existing VoIP products out there at the time sucked (mostly due to their inability to work through NAT).”

That’s why his team, which was led by the Skype and KaZaA co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, decided to instead put its energies into building a better VoIP offering, which ended up becoming Skype – but not after a subtle name change. Said Tallinn:

“It was originally called Skyper, but Skyper.net was taken, so we dropped the ‘r’.”

Janko Roettgers

Tallinn Bicycle Week began Thursday to end today, offering enthusiasts lectures, a night tour of the city and a group ride to Pirita for a picnic.This year's event is the second of its kind - the first cycle week took place in 2011 as part of Tallinn's European Capital of Culture year.

Organizers say they hope to greatly increase the number of regular cyclists so that local powers will take steps to expand cycling possibilities in the capital. On Thursday, bike-o-philes are welcome to gather at the trendy eatery F-hoone for three hours of lectures and panel discussions, which start at 18:00.

Friday's Tour d'ÖÖ is a regular event, held for the 12th time, with thousands taking to the streets for a trip around the city that culminates in a party at the Noblessner port. The tour sets off at 21:00 from Towers' Square, near the main railway station.

Bicycle-related activities, including a market, are planned at the same port on Saturday. The "week" will end on Sunday with a picnic in Pirita. Of course, a joint ride to the picnic area will take place, setting off from the Russalka monument in Kadriorg.

For more information, in Estonian, click here.

The Internal Security Agency has closed its investigation of 136 people in the residence permit scandal, having found no criminal wrongdoing.

Journalists revealed in 2011 that an Estonian MP and a Tallinn city councilor had been facilitating Estonian residence permits to rich foreigners on the basis of business, but 55 of the companies were registered at a single address and were inactive.

It was initially presumed that the foreigners were seeking access to the EU, but the final conclusion of the Police and Border Guard Board was that they wanted access to digital services connected to their Estonian bank accounts.

The case was reopened a year ago at the request of a special parliamentary committee, after it was initially determined that no criminal violations had taken place. None were found this time around either, despite suspicions that the residence permit applicants had supplied false information to authorities.

Twenty-one of the 136 permit holders have lost their temporary residence permits because their businesses did not begin operation by a required deadline.

Estonian Air signed an agreement to rent one Embraer aircraft to Air Lituanica, the recently founded Lithuanian national carrier, until the end of 2015.

The two airlines also plan to cooperate on the commercial side of the industry, including ticket sales and transfers, the Estonian state-owned company said in a press release today.

The 76-seat Embraer 170, along with another Embraer Air Lituanica has leased, will increase the number of flights from Vilnius to Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Moscow, Prague and Munich.

The maiden flight for the airline will take place on June 30, just one day before Lithuania takes over the rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union for six months.

According to Estonian Air, the new company will grow to four or five aircraft after three years, to service between 10 and 12 lines.