The charge which has arisen this week is that Nortal's close connections to the Eesti 200 party and through that, to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, gives the company an unfair advantage in public procurement – specifically of the personalized state project, an Eesti 200 key policy, and as such is a conflict of interest.

Speaking to ETV politics show "Esimene stuudio" Thursday night, Alamäe, a co-founder of Eesti 200, said: "Corruption is a very strong word. It essentially means a criminal offense. So I would be cautious in letting words like that fly around, as if used inappropriately, it can ruin lives."

"Corruption is not just some yarn to spin, and I would be very careful about throwing around accusations like these," Alamäe went on.

Alamäe also said that he doesn't "feel any guilt about anything whatsoever. We've done quite a lot of work on this, and a lot of smart people have put in their contributions."

"This entire vision was originally focused on foreign markets," he added, regarding the domestic controversy that has arisen.

Eesti 200 made the personalized state, or personal state (Estonian: Personaalse riik), a pre-election pledge, and was able to get the policy inserted into the coalition agreement signed with Reform and the Social Democrats (SDE).

Alamäe is both one of the key authors of the concept and a major donor to Eesti 200, in addition to having co-founded the party and heading up Nortal as noted.

Alamäe told "Esimene stuudio" presenter Mirko Ojakivi that the concept of a personalized state dates back to 2018, when Eesti 200 was founded, while the concept's substantive content has not changed in the intervening six years.

While the charges heard in the media are thus "borderline" and should be cast about only gingerly, Alamäe conceded that Nortal has begun to question whether it should participate, for example, in the mRiik smartphone e-state app tender in the near future.

This project, costing €800,000, was recently scrapped by the economic affairs ministry.

Alamäe said while Nortal has the capability to engage in the project and withdrawing would reduce the range of competition aiming at the tender – and would also lead to charges of having been "scared off," undertaking the project would lead to skeptical charges too.

"No good deed goes unpunished," Alamäe put it.

At the same time, all public tenders in Estonia are awarded via a fair and transparent public procurement process, while the vision of the personal state is, as it were, open source in that anyone can acquaint themselves with it if they wish, Alamäe said.

Nortal's white paper has been publicly available since last November and as such has been a "gift" to the Estonian state, he said.

"In Estonia, public procurement processes are not rigged. I have not seen that. Maybe there was something in the early 2000s, but now Estonia is clean," he said.

Whereas the personalized state vision is being provided to its country of origin for free, Alamäe went on, other countries will have to pay to obtain it.

"Estonia's e-government accounts for eight percent of our revenues [at Nortal]," he added

"This figure will fall over time because the Estonian market is small. Most of what we do now is outside Estonia. We have 800 people working on e-government issues," he continued, while "several other countries" have already taken up the Estonian e-state model.

Daily Eesti Päevaleht reported earlier this week that the vision of a personalized state as published by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications Is essentially a copy of Nortal's white paper, noteworthy given the strong connection Nortal has with Eesti 200 and thus, the IT and foreign trade minister, Tiit Riisalo.

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