Renting the apartment started a tangle that led to criminal charges.
Olli Saarela has also been accused of crimes before. Stock photo. Eve Teivainen
The rental of the apartment was managed by a film director Olli Saarelan60, and his spouse to the charges. Both were charged with fraud at the Helsinki district court on Monday. In addition, Saarela is accused of making an illegal threat.
Saarela and her spouse rented an apartment in Helsinki in August 2021. The apartment was supposed to be an employment apartment belonging to Saarela’s spouse’s employment contract, which would have been transferred to the spouse’s employer or Saarela and her spouse’s name after renting.
This did not happen, because according to the prosecutor, the employment apartment was not part of the employment contract.
According to the prosecutor, Saarela and his spouse hid from the woman that they have neither the ability nor the intention to transfer the contract to their names and do not pay rent to the woman.
In this way, according to the prosecutor, they caused the woman a financial loss of 5,410 euros.
The lease was terminated at the end of October 2021.
A couple of weeks earlier, Saarela threatened to beat the woman who rented the apartment, according to the prosecutor.
The prosecutor demands conditional imprisonment for Saarela and his spouse measured in days. The District Court of Helsinki will give its verdict in the case later.
Sentenced in the summer
This is not the first time Saarela has dealt with the police and the judiciary.
Last June, the Helsinki district court convicted Saarela of a drug crime after amphetamine and other drugs were found in his apartment. The sentence was 65 daily fines, of which he had to pay 975 euros.
In 2023, Saarela was sentenced to a 30-day fine for driving a vehicle without a license. Ten years earlier, he was convicted of drunk driving.
In 2017, he was accused of a serious accounting crime, but the charge was dismissed.
Saarela has been awarded three times with the Jussi award for best direction. He received his last award in 2000 for the film Bad Luck Love.
Iltalehti could not reach Saarela to comment on the charges.