Chaos around the purchase of ‘Googlegronden’ in Eemshaven

On September 22, 2017, director Harm Post of the Port of Groningen Seaports proudly poses for a photo with King’s Commissioner René Paas during his farewell party. He has just been knighted as Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau for his work in the northernmost tip of Groningen. Post changed the Eemshaven in seventeen years “from a rabbit paradise into an important economic center”, describes RTV North his merit. His greatest feat: the arrival of Google’s mega data center.

While he is being knighted, Post is still formally employed by the port authority. But he is already a paid advisor to Jean-Louis Bertholet’s company Powerfield. The latter is currently buying tens of hectares of land from farmers in Eemshaven – officially for solar panel parks. It is exactly the land that the port authority would very much like to buy for a possible expansion of Google.

The port authority is fishing behind the net. Bertholet, Post’s new employer, manages to snatch some forty-five hectares of land right in front of the port company. Instead of installing solar panels here, he still sells the land to the port company, with a price increase of ten euros per square meter. The new director König concludes these million-dollar transactions with oral agreements, after which all land will be delivered on December 3, 2018 via the notary. Bertholet makes a profit of almost 4.5 million euros in one fell swoop.

The issue is one of many land deals that professor of regional administration Marcel Boogers has investigated. As a result of revelations of news hour From 2021 on abuse of power and dubious land deals around Google’s data center, Boogers and his team wrote a report on Groningen Seaports’ land trade over the past ten years. Conclusion: the port authority and administrators have made mistakes and rules have been broken. Boogers draws the most attention to the opaque and far too complex way in which local government in and around Eemshaven is organized and the lack of control over this.

Regarding Post’s double cap, and the extra millions unnecessarily paid, the report states: “In one case, not enough was done to avoid (the appearance of) a conflict of interest. It concerns the role of the outgoing director of the NV as an advisor at Powerfield.” About the verbally concluded million-dollar deals by the new director, it is stated that “here has not acted in accordance with the requirements of democratic management, control and accountability in a transaction that was already under discussion.”

‘Business Opportunism’

In his report, public policy expert Boogers makes no judgments about people, he leaves that to politicians, he says in an explanation. “But of course we have established that a lot has gone wrong in various situations and that rules have been violated. When such a large company as Google comes forward, the dollar signs will light up in local governments. The question is whether you pay sufficient attention to due care requirements. And that was not the case here.”

The report judges harshly the way in which Groningen Seaports has traded in land over the past decade. Starting in 2013, the port authority sold lots to Google for the construction of a mega data center in Eemshaven that opened in 2016. The land purchases ran until 2020, but the tech giant has put the initial plans for a second data center there on hold for the time being.

Partly on the basis of interviews with the (former) directors involved, the report concludes that supervision of the land purchases “appeared to have fallen between two stools.” Result: the port authority acted out of ‘business opportunism’, whereby the ‘public and private interest’ was insufficiently safeguarded due to a lack of democratic control. Economic policy frameworks were also missing. Large-scale land transactions of tens of millions of euros were not transparent and powers were unclear. Boogers: “In the conversations, the tendency to point at others was very strong. We also often heard that it was very complicated and that the press had not understood it well. But they didn’t understand it themselves either.”

According to the researchers, the case where the port authority made the biggest mistake was a secret deal between Groningen Seaports and the family business Bakker Bierum, during the first land purchases in 2013. Groningen Seaports wanted to purchase plots from various farmers and sell them on to Google in one go. Bakker Bierum owned a large part of that land, but did not want to sell it for the maximum amount of 17 euros per square meter that the port company was willing to pay: the amount that all farmers would receive. Bakker Bierum wanted more – and got it. But through a detour, so that the port company could maintain that it paid all farmers the same amount.

The secret contract, formally a ‘settlement agreement’, stated in black and white that Bakker Bierum would receive at least five windmill rights – the promise to install five lucrative windmills in the future. Researcher Boogers was allowed to see the agreement, which is still secret, and read that the value of the commitments was more than five million.

Secret Agreement

news hour revealed the existence of this secret settlement agreement last year – the immediate cause for Provincial Council to demand an independent investigation. Deputy Rijzebol (CDA) then said about the suggestion of an interdependence between acquiring land and acquiring wind turbines: “I am shocked by this and I want this to be investigated.”

That interdependence is now established, but due to the duty of confidentiality, Boogers was unable to answer the question whether it was possible to act criminally. Boogers: „We wanted to ask the accountant of the port authority. But he imposed such conditions, including a penalty clause, that we withdrew from it – also because new information would fall under that secrecy. As a result, and due to the assignment of our investigation, we were unable to discuss the role of civil-law notaries and accountants.”

While the settlement agreement had to remain secret, the consequences of this became visible in Eemshaven, according to Boogers and his team. In order to allow Bakker Bierum to build the promised windmills – in some cases on the basis of others or land that had already been sold – the port authority had to set up complex notarial structures. For example, Groningen Seaports gave out pieces of land on lease, under lease, and even under sublease to Bakker Bierum.

The port authority tightened itself with these opaque constructions. For example, a farmer who once owned a piece of the ‘Google grounds’, for unexplained reasons, stipulated that he would receive 30,000 euros annually from the port company for decades to come, for land that no longer belonged to him, but where Bakker Bierum now has a windmill. built on. An extremely low rent was agreed at another windmill of the family business. Interesting detail: a family member and member of the board of Bakker Bierum also worked at the port.

The parties were also directly duped by the secret agreement. The Waddenwind Foundation had obtained a permit for a windmill via the usual routes, directly opposite the Google data center. But this turned out to be adjacent to a location where Bakker Bierum was also allowed to build a windmill. Only one of the two mills could come, the other had to be cancelled. The conflict between Waddenwind and Bakker Bierum ended in court, where Waddenwind was confronted with the secret promises from 2013. The result: Waddenwind had to pay Bakker Bierum eight hundred thousand euros, so that the family business would waive the secretly promised windmill.

Constructions too complex

The constructions are now so complicated that the port authority itself no longer seems to understand them. According to Boogers, this is partly due to the complicated structure in which Groningen Seaports is organised. On paper, the privatization of the port company almost ten years ago seemed very logical. Groningen Seaports was converted in 2013 into an independent, private limited company, which had to run the port as a company, freed from the sticky government. In addition, a government branch continued to exist. That was the Joint Regulation, a partnership between the province of Groningen and the two municipalities involved in the Eemshaven area, which became the sole shareholder. Through the Joint Regulations, the government nevertheless remained ultimately responsible and there was still the possibility to check and correct the management. At least that was the intention. “In practice, it is not always clear who controls what and who supervises what,” as a result of which there is “no conclusive monitoring and control mechanism”, the researchers note. The fact that the privatization of the port company also coincided with the expansion of the port and the arrival of Google ’caused a lack of clarity about tasks and powers’.

Dark derivatives in the Eemshaven

Boogers explains how this happened in practice: “The Board of Directors and the Supervisory Board always refer to each other, with the result that no one has checked.”

This became apparent in 2020, for example, when the Port Authority sold land for thirty-five million euros to Google, which the Port Authority believed to be the owner. But for a large part of the land that was still the government, through the Joint Regulations. It had been wrong in the annual reports of Groningen Seaports for years. The thirty-five million land was eventually donated to the port for 1 euro in November 2020, so that it could still sell it to Google.

According to Boogers, many of the mistakes are the result of the far too complicated governance structure, which he advises to get rid of. Deputy Rijzebol also came up with a plan for this this Friday. But the question remains whether this can close the past. Boogers: “Last year, the commissioner said at the start of the investigation that the upside down had to be done. That is not yet the case.”