After continuous protest from the village community against the arrival of an asylum seekers’ center, owner Maria Olde Heuvel announced to COA on Wednesday that she did not want to sell her Landhotel ‘t Elshuys. She accuses the agency of ‘mistake and deceit’, because it would never have been made known to her that large numbers of asylum seekers would be housed. “Then I would never have sold it,” she said in court on Monday.
The judge does not agree. ‘The COA has been open about the hotel’s intentions and does not oppose it,’ he judges. ‘It has always been clear that the AZC would use more beds than the hotel had.’ And so ‘a deal is a deal’ applies and Olde Heuvel still has to transfer the property on Monday or pay 50 thousand euros in penalty per day.
On August 12, Olde Heuvel signed the purchase agreement for its hotel with 27 rooms and 74 beds. When, a few days later, reports in the media revealed that the COA might want to scale up the capacity with units in an adjacent meadow to 150 to 300 sleeping places, they asked whether they could still consider the sale.
No, came the answer from COA. ‘Maria, two signatures have been placed, you can’t turn this back’, an employee of the COA had replied to her via WhatsApp. Initially she seemed to accept this and afterwards sent an invoice to the COA for the inventory and handed over the keys to secure the property.
It is unknown whether Olde Heuvel has been pressured to reverse the sale or has received a better offer than the 1.5 million euros that the COA is paying her. Anyway, she started proceedings on the merits at a court in The Hague to get out of the sale. To avoid such a lengthy procedure, the COA asked the Almelo judge for Monday’s emergency ruling to be able to proceed with the sale quickly.
Like the lawyers of the COA, the judge believes that this is an urgent case because of the reception crisis that has been making asylum seekers sleep outside for days in the application center in Ter Apel in Groningen. “The COA does not have the luxury of waiting for a substantive procedure, every bed counts at the moment,” said the COA’s lawyer.
Olde Heuvels lawyer sees it differently. By agreeing to the emergency procedure, the judge deprives Olde Heuvels of rights, he argues. This is partly due to the fact that there is only limited time for fact-finding in a summary proceedings judge. ‘The government has caused this problem, my client cannot be held responsible for the dire situation in Ter Apel.’
The COA lawyer calls the fact that Olde Heuvel wants to stop the sale because of the numbers of asylum seekers that are coming there, because Olde Heuvel never made a point of it during the negotiations. The purchase agreement even includes an article whereby Olde Heuvel waives the final destination of the hotel.
Moreover, Olde Heuvel’s broker had recommended the hotel in the first email to COA because there was so much space. Each room could ‘easily’ sleep three people and the hotel’s large hall could easily be converted into six more rooms, the real estate agent said in the email.
It also raised questions in the courts: ‘With a quick calculation I already arrive at 113 beds, why did the final number surprise you?’, he asks the saleswoman. She maintains that the number of two hundred was beyond her imagination. That is why she had not instructed her broker to aim for the ultimate number of asylum seekers.
A second COA lawyer then asks the question: ‘If the broker did not know that Mrs. Olde Heuvel thought the number of asylum seekers was important, how could the COA have known?’ The judge agrees. He understands that the saleswoman is shocked by the commotion after the sale, ‘but that doesn’t give you the right to go back on the sale’.
Residents of Albergen still strongly resist the arrival of a large shelter in their village. The hotel is full of slogans such as: ‘Away with it’ and ‘What are you doing to our beautiful village?’ After several discussions on social media about arson at the hotel, a fire actually raged in the night from Sunday to Monday. The police suspect arson. A black trail is visible along one wall and here and there the wall is blackened. At the start of the court hearing, the police were still investigating traces around the hotel.
Due to a lack of enthusiasm to receive asylum seekers, Albergen was the first place in the Netherlands to be ordered to receive an asylum seekers’ center this month. Although the municipality of Tubbergen, to which the 3,000 inhabitants of Albergen belong, was aware of the interest in the hotel, the purchase by COA came ‘as a surprise’. The Tubbergen municipality says it still finds the location unsuitable for receiving 300 asylum seekers and status holders and that they are in talks with the ministry to find a ‘workable solution’.