Haha, crappy free wifi where I am at for a few weeks, so I am assuming it would have something to do with selling off tooling/blueprints/rights to israelis for the galil? Hey, I learned something new today, cool.
You mention using the ones the finns bought, were you in the finnish army by any chance? I only ask out of curiosity as my old man served over there before he immigrated.
USSR selling AK technology to a non-communist country
in the middle of the Cold War speaks volumes about
the game of political chess that is hard to understand by the most,
even if in this particular case it was partial technology.
But the Russian license, like almost any license, was time limited.
After the due date, the Finns had to either make more payments
or stop production of the models incorporating said technology.
Because they were not allowed to buy
small arms technology (among other things)
from NATO countries, they chose to go for a while
with their own designs based on the AK, but those home-brewed
were very cost prohibitive and their gov cut their allowance.
They sold (and even traded) some of the
"independently" developed technology to Israel.
For their own needs, they looked for the cheapest of the
pure-bred AK they could find.
The Finn requirement was formulated that
the gun should best ressemble the Russian AK,
which they needed and wanted since the 50's.
Type 56 was the one that best met the requirement
(specific small mods were made).
Type 56 was started by the Chinese in the 50's and 60's
under
full Russian license/supervision/training.
Remember that the
military Type 56 is one of the
higher quality AK variants out there,
not at all "chinese crap" how the internet wannabes
want to make you believe.
The Russian-Chinese license for Type 56 was expired at the time,
but the contract stipulated the Chinese part
could continue to make and even sell the gun indefinitely.
Note that at that particular time, the Finns could have achieved
the Type 81 Chinese (stretched AK) or almost anything
from a very large variety of AK-based weapons,
but they went primarily with
what it was the closest to the real McCoy (but at "budget" prices),
because that was what they wanted.
I did not serve in the Fin army,
I only worked with them for a while.