A Finnish government party representative, who speaks of his migrant background proudly in political life, was convicted of three counts of fraud, but he "forgot" to inform his party about his criminal record. Somalian-born Abdirahim Hussein, who was elected to the Helsinki city council as a member of the Social Democratic Party, had received 12,000 euros as unemployment benefit illegitimately for years. Although he was busted and convicted, he has no intentions to resign. What s more, the whole case started with a pretentious lie.

Even though the Finnish government party MEPs regularly preach of the rule of law in the European Parliament, a huge skeleton fell out of their cupboard which they refuse to comment. Daily newspaper Iltalehti broke the scandal when it found out that the migrant Helsinki representative of the Finnish Social Democratic Party (SDP), the party of Prime Minister Anti Rinne, had misused social benefits for years and he was convicted for it on three occasions.

Somalian-born Abdirahim „Husu” Hussein busted himself with a lie. The politician and radio presenter also works as a taxi driver beside his political career. On Sunday, he tweeted about an incident in which he claimed that he had stopped along a motorway to order a passenger to leave his taxi for racist remarks. When the journalist of Helsingen Sanomat went after the story and asked how he could leave his passenger at such a dangerous place, the city councillor responded with a lie. He stated that although the passenger did make negative remarks like „if you really want to save Finland, go home to Somalia”, yet Hussein did not order him to leave the car. The councillor wanted to draw attention on „harassments against mainly foreign-born taxi drivers” with the made-up story.

However, the newspaper did not drop the story and turned to the city taxi company which officially denied Hussein s version as his car s GPS data confirmed that he had not been in the neighbourhood at the time he referred to and he did not pick up any passengers. The Somalian-born Finnish Social Democrat did not explain the case further but apologised instead and deleted the post from Twitter.   

At this point, the Helsinki daily Iltalehti did not abandon the story, but revealed that the man had lied to his own party. Although he had been convicted for fraud three times, Hussein claimed that he had no criminal record in all official forums even in the recent local elections when he became a member of the Helsinki city council. At the time of convictions, he was a taxi driver in the city of Turku, in south-west Finland, where he received unemployment benefit for years from 1998 to 2002, although he had a paid job. He was not discouraged by being caught red-handed and continued misusing social benefits. He was first convicted in 2000, and he was summoned to court again in 2001 and 2006 as he did not stop playing his „double game”. According to the justification attached to the three court decisions, the man claimed over 58,000 Finnish marks in total (about 12,000 euros today) without any legal basis. The court imposed daily penalties of 50 days in both the first and the second instances (the sum charged as daily penalty is not included in the ruling).

What the most striking is that Abdirahim Hussein did not resign after all these lies, but said that „the voters will decide for themselves”.

SPD s president was asked in parliament what his opinion was about the lies of a member of his party, but Prime Minister Anti Rinne only said that matters concerning a member of the city council were not a topic to be discussed by the Finnish parliament, although it is unfortunate that someone had „obviously lied”.