According to the Public Prosecution Service, agricultural consultancy firm Bergs Advies had a pattern of misleading the government. The judiciary bases this claim, among other things, on intercepted conversations between directors and customers, e-mails, reports of performance interviews, the testimony of a former employee and six ‘case files’. Based on this, according to the Public Prosecution Service, it has been established that providing criminal advice at the agency had a ‘sustainable and structural character’.
The penalty requirement is corresponding. In addition to three years in prison for three directors, half of which are conditional, the OM is demanding community service for the fourth, and a fine of four tons for the company. An ‘absurd’ sentence, according to the defense, which led to intense emotions. ‘The impact is enormous,’ said Bergs Advies’ lawyer. ‘Crying employees and administrators in the corridor and on the square. Afraid for their jobs and future, because in fact the death penalty has been demanded against the company.’
Calculate right
According to the Public Prosecution Service, the fraud that Bergs Advies committed with its customers took all kinds of forms. Manure stocks and manure transports were tampered with, the land used by a customer, as well as the number of animals present on a farm. Everything was aimed at producing more manure than permitted and spreading it on their own land, so that the farmer spent less money on transporting it.
‘Calculate justice’, ‘create solutions’ or ‘make fit’ of the assignments to the government was what Bergs Advies called the approach in the customer interviews. “That’s slang for fraud,” says the Public Prosecution Service.
For example, if a customer had too little land to place his manure on, the statement for the controlling Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) had to include ‘soil under’. He was going to take care of that, one of the directors assured the customer.
The creation of such a paper reality surprises some employees, according to the performance interviews. One employee ‘found it surprising at first that the work consisted of making things fit on paper.’ Another ‘indicates that she sometimes finds it difficult if it is decided to complete the manure accounts in a way that she feels is not correct’. An employee draws her conclusions and resigns. ‘At Bergs they wanted me to think more from the point of view of the customer instead of the legal rules. If the customer wanted more and wanted to break the law, Bergs could do that.’
Complex fertilizer legislation
The company is fairly open about this, according to a meeting about a new communication strategy. ‘The story of Bergs Advies has been described in more detail. This mainly concerns specialism, honesty, proximity and passion. Especially the word honest, should that be included?’
This possibility of cheating exists because of the complex fertilizer legislation that has been drawn up precisely to combat fraud. Public prosecutor Martijn Zwiers pointed to the case of the dairy farmer who, according to the Public Prosecution Service, committed fraud together with Bergs Advies to get more phosphate rights for his cows. Although the system of phosphate rights aims to reduce the amount of manure, space has also been created for ‘bottlenecks’. The conscious farmer made good use of this again.
‘These are forms of fraud that have already been repeatedly communicated to The Hague’, Zwiers sighed. But the regulations have certainly not been simplified, which means that enforcement is hardly possible in his view.
Patches
Because of those complex rules, ‘fitting on paper’ is a common practice, the defense argued. ‘Manure legislation often makes assumptions and estimates of the amount of manure, and errors can creep in when taking manure samples. This includes statements by Bergs advisers such as ‘I can play with the manure supply’, which the Public Prosecution Service uses as evidence for criminal behaviour.’
The Public Prosecution Service had also based itself too much on ‘snippets’ of telephone conversations taken out of context, the defense believed. One of the suspects touched on that in his closing words. ‘We speak both the language of the civil servants and that of the farmers, that is our profession. For the farmers you have to flatten all kinds of legal terms. And that is done in Limburg dialect with a choice of words and humor that an outsider does not immediately understand.’
The court will rule on Tuesday 20 December.