The Public Prosecution Service wants a lifelong professional ban for the management of the largest fertilizer consultancy in the Netherlands, Bergs Advies from Heythuysen in Limburg. According to the Public Prosecution Service, the four partners form a criminal organization specializing in large-scale, structural fraud in the agricultural sector.
On Monday afternoon, the Public Prosecution Service also demanded prison sentences of three years, of which one and a half years suspended, against partners Frank B. (59), Henk W. (55) and Tjerk V. (47). The fourth suspect, Pieter van L. (55), who played a smaller role in the organization, will receive a community service order of 240 hours if it is up to the Public Prosecution Service. But he too may never again give advice in the agricultural sector. A fine of 400,000 euros is demanded against the company Bergs Advies, half of which is conditional.
Farmer fraud
Clients of Bergs Advies are also on trial in the four-day trial about organized farmer fraud in the Netherlands: four pig and chicken farms and six individual farmers from Friesland, Zeeland, Brabant and Limburg. Fines and community service were demanded against them in particular. The customers, in addition to dozens of others, used the criminal services of Bergs Advies, according to the judiciary. It concerns fraud with subsidies, phosphate rights, permits, manure, accounting and agricultural plots.
The lifelong professional bans should put an end to these practices. The consultancy, which emerged in 2017 in a study by NRC to manure fraud, the manure accounting of hundreds of farmers from all over the Netherlands. According to the office itself, the customers together own a quarter of all Dutch pigs and chickens. Bergs Advies also advises agricultural entrepreneurs in the field of business development, management, zoning plan procedures, environmental and fertilizer legislation and subsidies.
Public prosecutor Martijn Zwiers called falsifying documents “an important part of business activity”. For example, customers could evade fertilizer legislation and commit fraud with subsidies. And the environment was additionally burdened with nitrogen and phosphate.
Previously convicted
According to officer Zwiers, the indictment is only “a cross-section” of years of fraud. In November 2018, the Public Prosecution Service, the FIOD and the investigation service of the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority raided Bergs Advies and nine other locations. It was the largest action by the Public Prosecution Service in this area to date. The consultancy, with 38 employees, has been under scrutiny for years, after being convicted in 2017 of co-perpetrating forgery in a fertilizer fraud case.
In his closing statement, officer Zwiers also denounced “the unpredictable government” that has imposed increasingly complex rules on the agricultural sector. According to him, honest farmers also suffer from the detailed regulations. “It is a complex system of rules that is difficult to enforce and also leads to a blurring of standards in the sector.”
Bergs Advies used the complexity of the system as a revenue model, according to Zwiers, who also pointed to the breach of trust between the government and the peasantry. “This file makes it clear where that lack of confidence comes from.”