June 2025 has all the makings of one of the worst months in Damen Shipyards’ almost centenary year. For weeks, the top management of the largest shipbuilder in the Netherlands has been in tense discussions with three ministries about state aid. This is due to a conflict with the German navy over the construction of six frigates, an order worth 7 billion euros. Damen’s naval branch has suffered serious delays in designing the ships. The Germans then stopped paying. The cash shortage is acute.
Halfway through the month, on June 17, there was a major setback: a ruling by the Amsterdam Court of Appeal. Damen must transfer 47 million euros in commission, including interest, to a former agent of the shipbuilder in the Caribbean. Ten years earlier, the man helped sell coast guard ships to Trinidad and Tobago, among others, but Damen had suspended payment of his wages. This happened after the tax investigation service FIOD raided the shipbuilder in 2017 due to corruption suspicions. Damen must still pay that bill from the court. But the company does not have the necessary millions in cash. It is not without reason that there is an urgent need for state aid.
Three days later, on June 20, the following unwelcome message arrived: three personal summonses. Founder Kommer Damen, his son and chairman of the board Arnout Damen and former chairman of the board René Berkvens must all report to the court in Zwolle as suspects of serious criminal offenses on November 24. As managers, they are said to be responsible for forgery in the payment of tens of millions of euros in commissions to suspicious intermediaries in Brazil, Sierra Leone and the Caribbean, among others.
In one month, all problems merge into an opaque mess of financial risks for one of the largest in the Netherlands.
Ships for Trinidad
The man who comes to claim his millions at this precarious moment is Stephen Hobson, a wealthy Briton who co-owns and trades in helicopters, armored vehicles, cranes, asphalt factories, water pipes, explosives and parking meters. He has been working for Kommer Damen since the turn of the millennium. Described in 2019 NRC how Hobson sold Damen ships to Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas in 2014 and 2015, worth almost 400 million euros.
For his mediation, he negotiated a commission of tens of millions of euros – payable in installments – a multiple of the guideline of a maximum of 5 percent commission that the Netherlands usually finds acceptable.
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Hobson didn’t get his money, except for an initial payment of a few million. Instead, Damen set aside its Caribbean commercial agent a year after signing all contracts. The reason: the shipbuilder had been suspected of corruption during the sale of a boat in Sierra Leone, and suddenly everyone had woken up.
The World Bank put Damen on a sanctions list and its own accountant Ernst & Young came across unusually high commissions for Hobson in an internal investigation – what did that man actually do for that money? Atradius DSB, which insures high-risk international deals on behalf of the state, caught Damen lying about the amount of the commission and the FIOD raided the head office in Gorinchem in 2017 with a great show of force, looking for evidence of corruption. The Public Prosecution Service seized the promised amounts and Hobson himself became a suspect in the criminal investigation that the Public Prosecution Service started into the shipbuilder, it was reported. NRC earlier.
President Ivan Duque of Colombia during a tour of a Damen Shipyards yard.
Photo Remko de Waal/ANP
Hobson has always maintained that nothing improper happened. The fact that he received more than the 5 percent that is the maximum standard in the Netherlands is not prohibited, he says. Moreover, he is contractually entitled to those amounts, after all, the ships have been delivered.
And so in recent years he has tried to get justice. With success, as appears from the ruling of the court in Amsterdam. In 2021, a Swiss arbitration court ruled that Damen had to pay the equivalent of 36 million euros to Hobson. In 2024, Hobson was proven right by the judge in Rotterdam in a council chamber hearing: the Public Prosecution Service had to remove the attachments. And in June this year, the court ruled that Damen had to implement the Swiss ruling. With interest, the amount has risen to an estimated 47 million euros.
Yet Hobson still doesn’t have his money. The Public Prosecution Service has appealed in cassation and is seizing the amounts. But Damen has lost the money. to a shielded account, despite the dire financial situation.
The Public Prosecution Service does not wish to respond substantively and states that it will discuss this case in court. A spokesperson for Damen does not want to comment on the criminal case and the payments to the agent – nor on the question of whether state aid was used to pay the commission. Hobson says through his lawyer that he is entitled to his money. He was a “business partner,” not an agent.
Delayed frigates
The statement about the millions for Hobson comes in the week that Damen management is feverishly discussing state aid with the Dutch government. Damen Naval, the company’s naval arm, is having major problems designing six F126 frigates for the German Ministry of Defense – a prestigious order worth 7 billion euros. At 166 meters in length, they are the largest warships ordered by the Germans since the Second World War.
The delivery of the frigates has been delayed by at least forty months, according to German Minister Boris Pistorius. This is because Damen cannot handle a new software package from the French supplier Dassault, which means that the construction drawings do not properly reach the German yards that have to deliver the frigates.
At the Damenwerf in Vlissingen there is a coming and going of consultants and crisis teams – the planning for the construction of frigates for the Dutch navy is also in jeopardy. Due to the delay, the German government is suspending interim payments while costs continue. German journalists leave NRC know that on German shipyards the keels are being pushed aside to make room for new jobs, for which they are paid.
At the beginning of July, the House of Representatives will agree to a support package for Damen of 270 million – although the precise form of the support remains confidential. Yet the problems are by no means over. The German Ministry of Defense is considering a plan to take control of the project away from Damen. According to the German defense publication Hartpunkt the German company Naval Vessels Lürssen (NVL) should become the main contractor for the project. That is not easy, it is expected that the transfer of contracts, designs and intellectual property will have to be negotiated for at least six months. In the new constellation, Damen would have a significantly smaller role.
The final work is being carried out on the Van Damen for a supply ship of the Royal Navy.
Photo JEFFREY GROENEWEG/ANP
Forgery and sanctions
The lawsuit against Damen Shipyards and its (former) directors is also getting closer. A last attempt by Damen’s lawyer to spare founder Kommer Damen, his son Arnout and former CEO René Berkvens from going to court in Zwolle on November 24, failed in September. The judges said after a special procedure that they consider it “not highly unlikely” that the men will be convicted.
This does not mean that all suspicions in the criminal case still stand. The FIOD suspected that Damen and his commercial agent had been guilty of official and non-official bribery in the Caribbean. The Public Prosecution Service has now dropped that suspicion for the commercial agent, Hobson said through his lawyer. Only the suspicion of forgery remains.
However, the Public Prosecution Service’s accusation remains that Damen has repeatedly lied about the amount of commissions it paid to brokers in corruption-prone countries. The amounts are said to be much higher than what Damen recorded in official documents and passed on to reinsurer Atradius DSB. Reconstructed before NRC how Damen misinformed the reinsurer in at least fourteen cases.
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Dutch policy is that a commission cannot be too high, otherwise Atradius DSB will not want to insure the deal. If the amount is high, the risk increases that a commercial agent will use that money to bribe clients.
The Public Prosecution Service also accuses Damen of deliberately avoiding sanctions by supplying so-called ‘dirk cranes’ to Russian crab catching vessels. TV program News hour reported last year, after its own investigation, about exports to Russia: Damen is said to have drawn up several false export declarations for this purpose. The company asked the Public Prosecution Service to drop this charge this year, because it only concerned two cranes that, according to experts, could be delivered. The Public Prosecution Service did not agree with that.
Damen says time and again that he faces the lawsuit with confidence. But the risks remain high: if Damen is convicted of corruption, Damen can be excluded from European tenders for four years. Moreover, a conviction could be a stick for the Germans to use in negotiations over who will be the main contractor for the delayed frigates.
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