Riho Pihlakas visited the children's play area at the Mustika shopping mall in Tallinn with his child in November 2024. The shopping center offers three hours of free parking with a parking clock. The father admitted that he lost track of time at the trampoline center and exceeded the free parking period by about 30 minutes. According to the posted rates, the extra 30 minutes should have cost €1.

"There was already a €55 fine notice under the windshield wiper and it seemed like an absurd amount. The sign says €1, but in reality Europark comes and asks for 55 times more," Pihlakas said.

A dispute that began with a single unfortunate fine has effectively changed the life of the 44-year-old small business owner and he believes it will have a seismic effect on the entire parking industry in Estonia.

Criticism of the parking business is also shared, in part, by the consumer disputes committee and the courts.

Operating for 20 years, Europark dominates Estonia's parking market and other companies largely follow its lead. Europark manages 65 percent of the market, or nearly 800 private parking lots across Estonia, in addition to municipal parking in some places, such as Tallinn.

According to Karol Kovanen, who has effectively run the company from the beginning, about 25 million parking sessions take place annually in areas managed by Europark and 25,000 fines were issued last year.

"Twenty-five thousand fines a year sounds like a lot. But if you look at it in terms of what you see on the streets, one fine is issued for every thousand cars that park. Seen that way, it is not very much," Kovanen said.

According to Kovanen, the company tries to avoid having to issue a fine in various ways, from having parking attendants walk around visibly and making it easy to contest a fine to forgiving innocent mistakes, such as entering the wrong zone or license plate number.

"We are a company and an activity under such intense public scrutiny — as I said, 25 million parking sessions a year — that we cannot afford to be manipulating anything or doing anything improper here. Imagine if we were doing something illegal. Everything is under very close public scrutiny, thoroughly argued and by the book."

In Pihlakas' view, however, Europark's activities are far from reasonable. When he did not pay the fine he received at Mustika Center, he got a reminder from the law firm EFTA Legal, which represents Europark, asking him to pay €65.

Looking more closely, it becomes clear that €10 of the €65 consisted of "costs related to identifying the owner or responsible user." Europark has a contract with the Estonian Transport Administration allowing it to request the identity of a vehicle's owner or responsible user, but such a request cost the company only €0.20 plus VAT at the time and €0.40 from the beginning of 2026.

According to Kovanen, Europark receives either a business registry code or a person's personal identification code from the Estonian Transport Administration. The company then has to obtain the person's name and address from the commercial register and the population register to determine whether the owner is a person or a company and then send an email.

"There is work being done in the background again. /.../ It is not unjust enrichment, that €10," Kovanen said.

Because Pihlakas also ignored the law firm's reminder, nine months later he received a payment order from Pärnu District Court, prepared on behalf of Europark, by which point the amount had risen to €180.

Pihlakas responded for the first time and contested the order in Harju District Court — but not only that. The man, who has a background in the IT sector, took the system apart both legally and commercially and what he found is, in his words, shocking.

Both Pihlakas and Pavel Gordijevski, who lives in Narva and has already gone through an exhausting legal battle, acknowledge that well-organized parking is a public good and that a property owner has the right to charge for the use of land. But in their view, Europark is engaged in profiteering.

Put simply, if parking costs €1, then €0.70 goes to the landowner and €0.30 to the company organizing the parking. Fines, however, largely go to the company. Moreover, while fines on city streets range from €30 to €40, Europark raised the maximum fine in private parking lots to €100 last year.

Kovanen explained: "If you look at our annual report, it shows that about €1 million a year comes in from contractual fines. €1 million sounds like a lot. But if you weigh it against all the monitoring, customer service, software solutions and so on, then the cost side is in the same range."

In its latest public annual report, Europark showed a profit of €1.6 million for 2024 and retained earnings of €7 million. But Kovanen said that money comes from parking services, not fines. He maintains that although the general terms and conditions allow it, the company has never actually issued a €100 fine and that the average fine ultimately collected is around €40.

At the same time, the consumer disputes committee operating under the Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority has recently made several decisions in which fines were canceled for being too high. For example, a day of parking at the lot at Õismäe tee 155b costs €3, but Europark issued a €70 fine there last summer.

According to the chairman of the consumer disputes committee, attorney Taavi Hein, a reasonable amount would be double or triple the parking fee. In other words, if parking in an area costs €30 a day, then a €60 fine is acceptable, but if the fee is €3, then a €60 fine is not. Kovanen called that absurd.

"If the contractual fine or any fine, whatever kind of fine, is the same size as the cost of the service itself — €1 or €3, what difference does it make? — then what is the point of anyone paying for the service at all? Then you can always try your luck and see whether you get caught or not. Basic logic already tells you that this does not make sense," Kovanen said.

The company challenged the consumer disputes committee's decisions in court. It turns out that Europark is one of Estonia's biggest filers of lawsuits, if not the biggest. Over the years, it says it has obtained about 1,600 final court rulings in its favor, but critics say that does not reflect the full picture and that a manipulative pattern lies behind it. That brings us back to Pavel Gordijevski.

In May 2021, his wife visited Tartu and parked at a gas station in the city center. She received a €45 fine and the matter ended up in court a couple of years later, with Gordijevski himself, who has legal training, representing the family. They lost in the first instance, but won on appeal. However, before the appellate ruling took effect, Europark announced that it wanted to withdraw the entire lawsuit.

"If the plaintiff withdraws its claim, that means the court must terminate the proceedings and, therefore, the court decision did not enter the register at that time and other people could not see it," Gordijevski explained.

Court rulings usually take effect after one month and it turns out that Europark has repeatedly withdrawn lawsuits during precisely that 30-day period.

In Gordijevski's case, the Tartu Circuit Court tried to prevent this and pointed out that Europark is a mass plaintiff involved in more than 2,500 proceedings at the time.

"By consistently withdrawing its claims after learning of a negative court ruling, the plaintiff removes publicly accessible court decisions in which its claims were dismissed. This may create the impression that no legal remedy is available in court regarding unlawful contractual fines," Gordijevski added.

According to Kovanen, however, such behavior is driven by pure pragmatism.

"If we see that we are going to lose the case, then we do not argue with the person. It is not our business to argue with anyone. /.../ If, as a party in court, you see that it is not beneficial for you to let it become public, then naturally you use the rights available to you under the law to withdraw it. There is nothing illegal about that," Kovanen said.

Europark took Gordijevski's case to the Supreme Court and ultimately won the right to withdraw the claim. In other words, once again: Europark itself went to court to demand payment of a €45 parking fine, but then withdrew the case and paid the Gordijevski family €1,236.61, including their legal costs. The father of the family said the situation made him smile.

"Yes, actually it was very successful parking. In the sense that you park the car for two minutes and get more than €1,000 for it."

"It is obvious and understandable that they analyze their mistakes and improve the quality of their work on the basis of every court decision. For example, if they lose, they withdraw the claim, but immediately put up additional signs, paint writing on the parking lots saying that it is private parking and try to improve their work from every angle. It is pure rationalism and pure business optimization," Gordijevski said.

According to Kovanen, the number of parking sessions has increased over the years, but the number of fines has fallen, which in his view shows that the issues have been more clearly resolved. The latest information nevertheless shows that 684 court cases involved the company last year and 129 had been filed as of early April this year.

Kovanen agreed that using Estonia's court resources to collect €20 or €30 fines is absurd.

"A very absurd activity, I agree. /.../ And no service provider — regardless of the field you are in — can allow a business model that includes people consuming the service without paying for it. So all of this monitoring, all of this, the fact that we really do go all the way in court with these claims actually ensures that throughout Estonia it is possible to organize parking in open areas using signs," the parking executive said.

According to Pihlakas, all of the discoveries were so shocking that at the beginning of the year he established a separate company that created and operates the website parkimistrahv.ee. On the one hand, the site documents his own dispute process; on the other, it exposes Europark's business model and gives advice on how to challenge parking fines.

He has submitted numerous requests for information, memorandums and even a separate lawsuit against Europark and last week launched a petition on rahvaalgatus.ee to set a cap on parking fines.

On the one hand, Europark's CEO says he has survived several similar campaigns. On the other, he detects self-interest in Pihlakas' behavior.

"If we are talking about that website, then it is just another curiosity. There have been others before. And you cannot fault people for being active. Clearly, the person is on a mission, but it is uninformed to put it mildly and amounts to giving people false information when put directly. I do not want to speculate further, but when people are invited to seek advice, there are already some indications of a scam," Kovanen said.

A similar website also exists concerning the other major parking company, Ühisteenused.

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