A Man Named Merisalo

During my school years I was active in peer support, the school council, and wastepaper collection projects to raise funds for Ruovesi Upper Secondary School, and I’ve been active in various other local associations. Alongside everything else, I also worked summer jobs at the Kotvio Oy sawmill, where at age 15, in the summer of 1980, I suffered a serious workplace accident that changed my life plans in many ways. Before the 1980 accident I had two goals: either to become a sawmill manager and attend sawmill industry school, or to become a fire chief and attend the state fire academy. From a young boy until 1986 I was involved in the volunteer fire brigade (Ruovesi VPK), and in later decades I became known, through the companies I represented, as a collector of vintage fire engines. Both of my original career dreams ultimately went unfulfilled due to what happened in the summer of 1980, although my involvement in the fire brigade and my work in the sawmill industry did materialize in other ways.

Since the autumn of 1985, I have been involved in the real estate and corporate acquisition sector in one form or another, both in my own and in companies owned by others. In the years 1987-1993, I lived in Ähtäri and at the same time worked as an investment director in the companies of a large private investor in South Ostrobothnia and in our own family companies. During that period (1987-1993), we lived in the historic Vääräkoski mansion, where my only child, my beloved daughter Anniina Katariina, was born in 1989. That period was the happiest of my life so far! In parallel with my work as an Ostrobothnian investor, I also worked as an investment director and a management consultant in the companies of a real estate investor in Hämeenlinna and Helsinki from 1990-1995. I worked in the furniture trade and furniture industry from 1996 to 1998, and partly at the same time I worked as a unit manager at Kanrak from 1995 to 2001 and again from 06/2010 to 05/2011. From the beginning of 2002 until June 2009 I worked as a business director and the CEO of the development subsidiary of the Nova Group (probably familiar to many from the media), a national company specializing in commercial premises brokerage, commercial premises consulting, real estate development and expert services in land use and construction. At the same time, I continued in the real estate business as the property development director of Virsseli Oy, owned by Motonet’s founder (now deceased) economist Lauri Juntunen, as the business director of Kanrak Oy, and as a business consultant and CEO at Suomen Toimitilapavelut Oy. In 2010-04/2012, I also worked as a division manager at Hansa Deal Oy (currently Aninkaisten Kiinteistönvälitys Oy), a real estate development, premises and business services company belonging to the Lease Deal Oyj group, until I went on a “forced vacation” ordered by the Finnish state on 19 April 2012, i.e. to serve my prison sentence for the consequences of Nova’s bankruptcy, which ended with my probation starting on 23 December 2013 and my final release on 21 June 2014.

During the aforementioned process, on September 18, 2013, I started a magazine renewal project at the department store company Kärkkäinen Oy, owned by my old friend Juha Kärkkäinen, where the company discontinued its old magazine and a completely new magazine with a new name and completely new content, etc. was published on December 5, 2013 under the name KauppaSuomi. The new magazine became Finland’s largest weekly free magazine, with a national circulation of over two million and a circulation of over a million for the basic magazine, and the magazine has over 2-3 million readers. It was a nice project to be involved in, and my return to civilian life and working life through this interesting and challenging project was realized through interesting work, and I am especially grateful to my friend Juha for that. For me, the magazine project came to a conclusion/end point in accordance with the goals in early 2014 and from 17.02.2014 I moved to the position of Real Estate Director of the Kärkkäinen Group and its subsidiaries (where I worked until the end of 2017) and, in addition to my main job, to the position of Real Estate Development Director and Senior Advisor of the consulting company Sadepisara Consulting Oy (later NordPoint Group Oy), founded in 1989 and owned by Juha Kärkkäinen. I worked in this position until autumn 2019 and resigned from there and moved out of the company with my team, when the ownership of the company changed twice after Kärkkäinen’s ownership and was quite unclear with its foreign owners. The operations of the aforementioned company ended just over a year after our team left.

Currently (since September 2019) I am the Property Director of Nordicon, i.e. Nordic Icon Consulting Oy and Nordic Icon Group NG Oy in Finland, and the Business Director of Nordicon in the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania).

During the election money frenzy, the fact that I have been involved in developing, building and implementing over two million square meters of various office spaces with various partners in different parts of Finland, worth over one and a half billion euros, has created over 10,000 new jobs during my 39 years in the office space business. In addition to these, I have been involved in project development and construction of a large number of residential properties and other real estate projects. This activity continues through my work at Nordicon (www.nordicon.fi) both in Finland and in the Baltic countries.