The stumbling block is a letter with 23 complaints that was sent in the summer of 2021 from confidential advisers to the current Speaker of the House Vera Bergkamp (D66) and the top officials of the House. This letter, along with other documents, was provided to the State Attorney by Bergkamp and Clerk Simone Roos last month, with the aim of assessing whether an investigation into misconduct by Arib should be launched.
At least three of the six confidential advisers are stunned by this. Anneke Kooij, who co-signed the letter in question, says that the 23 complaints constitute ‘no concrete evidence’ against Arib. She has ‘no idea’ why the letter of complaint was handed over to State Attorney Pels Rijcken for advice about a possible investigation into Arib. ‘I have not done that.’
Complaints about other MPs too
According to Kooij, the letter from the confidential advisers should be interpreted as a general ‘signal about social insecurity’ in the House. “There’s nothing more or less in it than that.” According to Kooij, the letter relates to a period of 3.5 years (2018-2021) in which complaints about MPs from other parties were also circulated. Kooij: ‘So those reports could also have been about others.’
A second confidential adviser, Monique Christiaanse, also says that she does not recognize the 23 complaints. She doesn’t even know ‘that whole letter’. A third confidential adviser, who wishes to remain anonymous, also says he is not aware of a letter containing 23 complaints about Arib. This is remarkable, because the confidential advisers do consult with each other regularly and jointly draw up an annual report. The House of Representatives has a total of six confidential advisers for almost six hundred employees.
‘So to and such chaos’
As far as Christiaanse is concerned, the wrong impression has been created that the letter was drawn up on behalf of all confidential advisers. Inquiry from de Volkskrant learns that the letter was only signed by two confidential advisers, namely Anneke Kooij and Anita Bos. This is important to Christiaanse, because she does not want Parliament employees to think that she has shared confidential information with the Presidium, the board of the House of Representatives: ‘As a result of this whole event, people who work in the House have not started to feel safer. Because now it’s like running straight to the presidency and going to report it if someone comes to me with something. That’s not our job at all’, says Christiaanse. “I find this all so awful and such chaos.”
There are also three confidential advisers who do not want to respond to questions from de Volkskrant. They refer to their spokesperson, who also appears to be speaking on behalf of Chamber President Bergkamp, the registrar and the head of personnel affairs of the House of Representatives. The spokeswoman does not want to clarify whether all 23 reports in the letter from the confidential advisers are about Arib or whether there is a misunderstanding about this.
Some of the members of parliament have had doubts about the approach to the investigation into Arib for some time and therefore asked Bergkamp and the presidium last Tuesday to stop the investigation. A decision on this is expected shortly.
The chairman of the works council of the House, Michel Meerts, put pressure on the presidium on Thursday to let the investigation continue, because a lack of clarity about this would lead to “great unrest” among the official staff of the House of Representatives, Meerts said to the newspaper. RTL News.
Different daylight
At the same time, the decision to launch an investigation into Arib is suddenly cast in a new light now that at least three confidential advisers believe that some of the evidence cannot be used against Arib. The suggestion that there may have been 23 complaints for some time played a major role in the decision of the eight presidium members to start an investigation into Arib at all, two of them told de Volkskrant. They speak on condition of anonymity, because it is a criminal offense to leak from presidency meetings.
The first presidency member says that the investigation into Arib eventually came about after an accumulation of signals of transgressive behavior: first two anonymous letters came in early this year, then management said it recognized the incidents in the letters and then it appeared that another letter of complaint from the confidential advisers. The first anonymous letter of February was therefore no reason for the presidency to investigate.
Anonymous complaints
Only when it became known that Arib would become chairman of the corona inquiry committee and another anonymous letter came in in July, the matter started to shift. In it, the letter writer describes conflicts that others would have had with Arib. Those incidents were then “confirmed by the management team and counselors,” the presidency member says. Precisely the suggestion that there would also be another 23 complaints about Arib with the confidential advisers, meant that the member could not ignore the anonymous complaints. ‘Then confidential counselors say: we also have 23 incidents that describe the same thing.’
Both members of the presidency say that they have not seen the letter containing 23 complaints themselves, but that during the presidency meeting they were merely ‘informed in general terms that something like this has come in’ and that ‘someone explained something about it at the time’. For the second member of the presidency, the information about the 23 complaints also played an important role in the decision to have Arib formally investigated by Hoffmann Bedrijfsrecherche. ‘If someone has signs that something is really not going well, you should do something about it,’ says the second member of the presidency.