Revenge was not served cold, but warm. While Prime Minister Rutte was visiting the Ukrainian city of Irpin, which had been destroyed by Russia on Monday, the Financial Newspaper† Fidelity and The Green Amsterdammer the trade and walk of ex-European Commissioner Kroes and the Tax and Customs Administration around the ‘disruptive’ taxi service Uber. Based on 124,000 leaked internal documents.
This one Uber traffic jams stink. They may not smell of outright corruption, but they certainly smell of hypocrisy and the rule of law corruption. To begin with the hypocrisy. For years, the Dutch government has cited corruption as the reason why Ukraine could not join the EU. On the Index of Transparency International After all, the Netherlands is in eighth place in terms of bribe cleanliness, while Ukraine is at the bottom at 122. But what turns out? Its own patriots and even the State of the Netherlands, which wants to keep ‘our’ Europe free from foreign stains, are guilty of subversive behavior within the EU.
That ex-European Commissioner Kroes started working for the taxi app too soon after her departure from Brussels and did not care about the European guidelines that she herself had once subscribed – Commission President Juncker was presumably “drunk”, she emailed Uber – is painful. Albeit no surprise, because Kroes often sees laws as categories that apply not so much to her but to others.
However, it is more than painful that the Dutch tax authorities simultaneously passed on confidential information from tax colleagues in Sweden and Great Britain to Uber in order to keep the company out of the wind for as long as possible. In the words of Leiden professor of tax law Jan van de Streek, this counter-espionage among colleagues in other EU Member States has ‘illegally undermined cooperation with other tax authorities’. If done intentionally, it could be a breach of duty and even a criminal offence.” according to Van de Streek at news hour†
This is no longer about hypocrisy, this is about corruption. The Tax and Customs Administration may have knowingly acted as a double agent by sharing valuable secret knowledge with a ‘disruptive innovative’ company from abroad. Tax haven The Netherlands has thus exposed itself as an unreliable ally within the EU.
Didn’t the tax authorities do that for the sake of employment and on behalf of the legislator? That will indeed be the defense of the Tax and Customs Administration, which already ‘does not recognize itself’ in the reporting. But that does not alter the fact that these unilateral and uncontrollable deals have in the meantime become a threat to the rule of law.
The Tax and Customs Administration is an institution pre-eminently governed by the rule of law. If there is one state monopoly that must treat all citizens equally in equal circumstances, it is the tax authorities. ‘Strict yet fair’ may be a cliché, but it is true. In our democratic order, where property has been around since 1798 a constitutional achievement and tax collection must have a constitutional basis for the same amount of time, a murky sense of norms undermines more than just the quality of the civil service. If the Tax and Customs Administration associates itself with a foreign group (Uber) and at the same time turns against ordinary citizens (Toeslagenaffaire) – to name just two files – then it undermines nothing less than a cornerstone of democracy: mutual trust in society.
The number of issues with the tax authorities is now so great that there seems to be a pattern. Before long, the Netherlands will converge with the ‘corrupt’ East, which it criticizes itself with so much pontiff and self-importance. Ten to one that Rutte does not recognize himself in this either. That would be a mistake. If he waits until half of the Netherlands has the red-white-blue reversed, then the revenge is suddenly served cold and it is too late.
Hubert Smeets is a journalist and historian.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of 14 July 2022