From this Monday, the court in Den Bosch will allocate four days to the handling of a large manure fraud case. Hundreds of farmers and transporters in East Brabant and Limburg are involved in this. Justice suspects them of cheating with the accounts, which allowed them to spread more manure than is allowed. According to the Public Prosecution Service, this has caused major damage to nature reserves and water.
Justice has been working towards this lawsuit with a year-long investigation. That caution is required. The processing of manure requires complex accounting. One cannot do without the other. Justice therefore sees Bergs Advies in Heyhuysen in North Limburg as a spider in the web of the manure fraud case. Advisors to the company are said to have given hundreds of customers tips on how to evade the fertilizer legislation.
The company is also suspected of forging documents. For example, by administratively increasing the milk yield, farmers created more space for their manure accounting. Or by granting a farmer more land on paper than was actually the case, more manure could be spread.
cheating
It doesn’t stop there. Cheating with truck loading data, drivers bypassing GPS controls and labs falsifying (manure) samples. A close network has been created in the Peel in particular, in which all parties work closely together.
Hundreds of manure transports drive daily in East Brabant, while the NVWA can only compensate a handful of inspectors. Farmers and fertilizer entrepreneurs know the names, faces and license plates. They warn each other about the controllers. It is a network against which national government services such as NVWA and ROV have to compete. Justice speaks of a ‘criminal organization’.
Manure accounting
The interests are therefore great. Manure processing is about half a billion euros annually. It is lucrative to cheat. Not only by increasing the level of phosphate and nitrogen in the laboratory samples. Farmers and transporters also obscure their actual manure accounting by driving empty trucks loaded with manure on paper.
It looks like slurry is being removed, but in reality the manure goes into the ground. This is cheaper than actually transporting it by truck, which costs about a thousand euros. Illegal dumping has seriously polluted the groundwater.
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