In recent years, Marco Borsato has had to pay an unprecedented number of bills to the lawyer couple Geert-Jan and Carry Knoops. Who pays for this? “Ultimately the taxpayers.”
It has cost Marco Borsato an unprecedented amount of money, not to mention lost income: the fornication case filed against him. In the end, it turned out that he had been canceled all those years for nothing, because the judge acquitted him and the evidence was so poor that the Public Prosecution Service ultimately did not even appeal.
1,200 euros per hour
To be on the safe side, Marco had hired two of the most expensive lawyers in the country: the couple Geert-Jan and Carry Knoops. Criminal lawyer Mark Teurlings thinks that the singer has lost around half a million euros in legal costs. “This is a big deal,” he says Weekend. “I think two or three tons is on the low side.”
Half a million euros, how is that possible? Even reading an app is perceived as five or six minutes of work, Mark explains. He also points to the hearing days. “Together they already cost 1,200 euros times twenty hours, because they were busy from early in the morning until late at night,” he says. The bill? 24,000 euros. Purely and only for the hearing days.
The state pays
Marco can now submit all those receipts to the court, Mark explains. “You can get the entire invoice back. Then it will be assessed to what extent it is reasonable. Perhaps the court will say: ‘We will moderate the invoice’, because they did not really think it was necessary to hire two of the most expensive lawyers in the Netherlands.”
But they can also simply reimburse everything, says Mark. The state pays, in other words: the taxpayer. When asked whether reclaiming attorney fees often happens, he answers: “Yes, almost always.”
Acerbic
De Weekend thinks this gives mixed feelings. “The fact that the bill of half a million euros may have to be paid by the Dutch taxpayer will cause heated discussions at many coffee tables.”
Mark concludes: “That’s right. But yes, the Public Prosecution Service prosecutes, not that woman, and the Public Prosecution Service acts on behalf of the state.”