Eesti Energia to be subject to special audit by Sorainen and Grant Thornton
Minister of Finance Mart Võrklaev (Reform), as the representative of Eesti Energia's sole shareholder in the state-owned energy company, appointed law firm Sorainen and audit firm Grant Thornton to conduct a special audit of the company, whose joint offer was the best in the tender.
Võrklaev stated in the signed document that the combined offer of Sorainen Law Firm and Grant Thornton Baltic Audit Firm was successful, as it received the most points (92.31).
The supervisory board of Eesti Energia must now authorize the management board to award the contract to the special auditor after the deadline for challenging the tender procedure and the waiting period expires.
The minister of finance announced in April that a special audit would be carried out at Eesti Energia this year to assess the management performance of the group.
The new board's audits have uncovered questionable aspects of some of the activities that require attention, Võrklaev said.
According to the minister, the state, as the owner, wants to find out how the current situation could have arisen – whether there were systemic errors in management and to what extent the previous management is responsible. The previous chairman of the board was Hando Sutter.
The period it covers is from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2023.
Einari Kisel, a member of Eesti Energia's supervisory board, told the newspaper Postimees in early May that the investment decisions of the company's previous board could have caused tens of millions of euros in losses. "This is not a definite suspicion, but there are some transactions where it is clear that the risks have been misjudged," Kisel said.
Asked by the newspaper whether forward prices for electricity and oil had been wrongly set, Kisel replied that it is always possible to be a precision scientist with the benefit of hindsight and show that something could have been done better somewhere. "If you look at the market projections at the time, you couldn't get a better deal. All transactions were made on a market basis. Eesti Energia does much less forward trading today than in the past," he added.
In the first quarter, Eesti Energia Group's sales amounted to € 500 million and normalized net profit to € 89 million. Both were lower than in the same period of the previous year.
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Editor: Kristina Kersa
