The Public Prosecution Service has spent around 3.4 million euros to external lawyers in a high -rise conflict on the violation of the right of non -disclosure of law firm Stibbe. The majority of the amount – more than three million euros – went to Landsadvocaat Pels Rijcken. This is evident from an overview that the OM prepared after an appeal to the Open Government Act (WOO) by NRC.
The right of non -disclosure is the right of lawyers to keep confidential communication with their clients secret. It is a cornerstone of the rule of law: everyone must be able to turn to a lawyer without fear of disclosure.
The years of conflict ended in a defeat for the OM: in 2023, the Court of Appeal ruled that investigating officers had access to thousands of confidential lawyers emails and that the right of non -disclosure had been violated several times and structurally. Shortly thereafter, the OM sepened the criminal case against asset manager Box Consultants – Stibbe, suspected of fraud,.
Faced with the legal costs, chief officer Michiel Zwinkels of the functional public prosecutor recognizes that it concerns ‘very large amounts’. According to him, the highest unusual is that the OM, that has a lot of legal knowledge, spends such amounts to external lawyers. He calls the case “unique” because of the long duration and because at the same time she was fought out in criminal, civil and administrative law.
Royal family
In 2013, the functional public prosecutor’s office criminal investigation ‘Castor’ to Box Consultants, a Brabant asset manager with, among others, members of the royal family as a clientele. The leading office and his director were suspected of having withheld millions in commissions.
Investigation service FIOD invaded in March 2015 at the VEMOGEVANTAMER in Waalre. Box Consultants then hired Stibbe law firm. In the following period, the FIOD secretly seized the external mail server of Box, which also brought confidential emails that Box with his lawyers changed in the hands of the judiciary.
Investigative officials could never get acquainted with the lawyers emails
According to the official working method, it guaranteed to have the right of visual rights assessed and destroyed by a special ‘secret holder officer’ – who had nothing to do with the investigation – in the Beslagnames lawyers emails. Investigative officials could never get acquainted with those messages. However, when the OM used a few emails in disciplinary complaints against the Box accountant and a Stibbe lawyer in 2018, it turned out to be the opposite for Stibbe.
The Amsterdam lawyers then started countless civil, administrative and criminal proceedings to expose the violation of their right of non-disclosure. In September 2018, the court ruled for the first time that there was a (limited) violation of the right of non -disclosure. From the civil court, Stibbe received permission in 2019 to seize supporting documents at the OM who could demonstrate the precise violation.
Assisted by Pels Rijcken, the OM then opposed disclosure with hand and tooth. Before the judge, suggestions about large -scale violations were put away as “unfounded insinuations” and “completely out of the sky.” According to the OM, Stibbe was out for the internal information to sabotage the criminal case against Box Consultants.
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Great turmoil
The legal battle, which NRC has been following since 2019, gradually it turned out that the ‘guarantees’ presented by the OM was not involved in seizures of e-mail servers. In the court, Pels Rijcken and the OM did not proclaim the truth about the internal state of affairs. As early as 2019, the Court of Appeal provided solid criticism by concluding that it had been incorrectly informed and noted that asking questions to the OM “does not always give a guarantee of getting correct answers”.
To get clarity, various judges forced the Public Prosecution Service to release internal documents and allowing witness hearings. This showed, among other things, that the OM had more than three thousand e-mails on which the right of disclosure of the Stibbe lawyers rested. Contrary to what the OM and the national lawyer claimed for years, the confidential documents were not destroyed, but simply digitally accessible for the investigation team.
After the judgment of the Den Bosch Court of Appeal in May 2023, which stated that the right of non -disclosure had been structurally violated, the judiciary changed course. Half a year later, the criminal case against Box Consultants was dismissed. In a press release, it regretted the “afterwards, incorrect choices” and stated the right to prosecute Box.
The stocking was not finished with that. The disciplinary law of FIOD and OM, an accountant, was suspended by the audit room for six months at the end of 2023 because of the use of the confidential documents. National lawyer Pels Rijcken also ended up in the dock. According to Stibbe, the office had kept the violation under the cap for years.
A unique followed in 2024: a disciplinary conviction of the national lawyer. Reimer Veldhuis should have previously destroyed the documents entitled to the Version that had been played by the OM. The disciplinary court found that Pels Rijcken did not spoke the truth about dealing with the confidential lawyers at the OM, but saw no evidence that deliberate inaccuracies had been proclaimed.
The Castor case caused great turmoil within the Dutch legal profession because it turned out that confidential lawyers were not safe. It resulted in a completely new working method. The Supreme Court ruled last year that only the independent judge-and not a public prosecutor-may assess whether seized e-mails are confidential. Since then, that filter task has been with the examining magistrate.
Gap
Chief officer Zwinkels put an end to the dragging procedures shortly after his appointment in March 2023. According to him, the Castor case has led to the right to the non-disclosure high on the agenda at the OM. For example, a steering committee was established with the legal profession and case law for consultation on the theme. The Functional Public Prosecutor has also created ‘reflection rooms’ for large criminal cases in which it is evaluated in the meantime whether the criminal investigation is still going in the right direction.
When asked, Zwinkels does not respond to when the Castor case derailed and whether it should not have been sought for years before. That question is on the table with a running internal evaluation. National lawyer Pels Rijcken also refuses “because of the lawyer-client confidence” comments. The question of whether Pels Rijcken advised the case to immediately dismiss the case and to play an open card about the size of the non -violence violations remains unanswered.
The financial overview that the OM set up for NRC shows that more than two million euros of the external lawyers are related to procedures since 2019, after Stibbe had placed evidence of the FIOD and the OM. That money largely went to civil proceedings in which the OM opposed disclosure of internal documents that could uncover the precise violation of the right of non -disclosure.
Both parties do not want to say anything about the amount of the reimbursement of Stibbe’s laws costs
Zwinkels thinks it is too simple to say that these costs could have been saved. He points out that since 2019 the legal process has meant a lot for legal development on the right of non -disclosure. “It has been an incredibly important matter because she has led to the answer to large legal questions,” he says. “The Supreme Court has uncovered a gap in the legislation and made it clear that the OM should not determine the examining magistrate which digital documents fall under the right of non-disclosure.”
According to Stibbe lawyer Tim De Greve, the lecture of Zwinkels ignores the most crucial point. “If the OM and the national lawyer had been fair from the start about the way in which our confidential documents had been dealt with, we could have clearly presented the facts to the Supreme Court in 2019. Then there would have been legal clarity without litigating for years and without millions of costs,” he says. “The extent of the violation of the disclosure only came up bit by bit, only after procedures that we won.”
The total costs of the Castor case are higher than the 3.4 million euros from the cost overview that the OM provided to NRC. Since 2013, OM and FIOD have spent thousands of man -hours on the business. In addition, the OM concluded a settlement agreement with Box Consultants in the seponation of the criminal case. It has been agreed that the State reimburses Stibbe’s lawyers in all procedures won by the office. Neither Stibbe nor the Public Prosecution Service do not want to say anything about the amount because of a confidentiality clause. Given the Zuidas-Ourfs rates, this amount is probably in the millions.
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