Value of a mature tree is normally several thousand euros here (I don't know about Finland).
Multipled by 250K. Times 3 -- a decent factor for illegal acts.
Would be a appropriate compensation for Finland.
You can buy a similar sized forest for €50-150K.
https://www.metsatilat.fi/en/osta?property_type=forest&area_...
Or maybe this is a bad measure?
You also forgot that Google owned the trees that they cut down, so they would be compensating themselves.
The debate is about the order in which a contractor pulled permits. It’s silly how much people are obsessing over some trees being cut down. This happens with all development.
What the news is about is "environmental impact study".
For Google, a fine of ~EUR 5 billion is a rounding error in their cost of doing business.
Not really? That’d be ~1% of global revenue and ~2% of opex? Sure they could pay it, but it’s not a negligible amount.
This is part of a 2 year, €13 billion investment by Google, so €5 billion is nearly all of the yearly investment of a single project.
On the other hand, Finland is only a part of Google's world-wide projects, and these projects are expected to produce revenue for, what, decades?
A 10-year time frame changes your numbers to ~0.1% and ~0.2%.
That's a perfectly normal and environmentally conscious thing to do before laying down concrete foundations. Topsoil is recycled and sold to farms. To leave it in place would pointlessly waste an ecological resource.
According to the Guardian article, which it the source the NY Post used, if those trees were illegally logged, they cannot be sold to wood-processing plants.
Do you know if the law also prohibits the topsoil from being sold to farms?