That this is noteworthy relates to the fact that Nortal has links to members of the coalition party Eesti 200, via its majority shareholder Priit Alamäe, who is also a co-founder of Eesti 200, formed in 2018, and who has donated a total of €439,000 to the party in the years since then.

EPL notes that the economic affairs ministry vision unveiled this month and prefaced with the phrase "personalized state," contains identical wording to a white paper issued by Nortal last fall.

The personalized state, or personal state (Estonian: Personaalse riik), is a key Eesti 200 watchword policy.

The two vision documents contain identical keywords, taglines, examples and even illustrations, EPL reports, even as their preparation process were ostensibly wholly separate events.

A spokesperson from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications claimed that the vision document was not commissioned externally, however.

Minister of IT and Economic Affairs Tiit Riisalo (Eesti 200) told EPL he sees no conflict of interest regarding a potential €200 million spending that the implementation of the personalized state would entail.

Andres Raieste, Nortal public sector adviser and also an Eesti 200 member, told EPL that the plan as drawn up was financed by the company itself and it was conducted in cooperation with researchers from the University of Tartu, with the goal of speeding up business growth via the digitalization of the public sector far beyond Estonia's borders, and both in Europe and in North America.

Nortal is not currently cooperating with the ministry, Raieste added, though its white paper was made available to the ministry as a single source.

EPL notes that, as far as the publication is aware, the creation of a personalized state vision document was the brainchild of Minister Riisalo, that is, there had been no political pressure from Eesti 200 ministers to prepare and publish it, as evidenced by the fact that the phrase "personalized state" was already found both in Eesti 200's manifesto published after its founding, and in the Reform-SDE-Eesti 200 coalition agreement signed last April.

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