The turnips were done when, in the summer of 2001, Peter de Jong approached the House of Representatives and the press with his story about higher professional education institutions that cheated with numbers of students. For months the Ministry of Education had kept him on a leash, the Chamber was standing on its hind legs. The affair is known as the HBO fraud and has cost at least one top official.
De Jong, founder and owner of an English-language private university of applied sciences for foreign students, had sounded the alarm because colleges of higher education (mostly foreign) students of commercial master’s programs were registering as ordinary HBO students. For this they received ten grand per student from the government. A canard, said Minister Loek Hermans of Education. A parliamentary committee of inquiry found that almost 100 million euros had been committed.
Peter’s business went bankrupt because of the unfair competition. He was powerful enough not to be peeped by those guys from the ministry’, says Koos de Vos, former colleague and friend of De Jong. ‘Peter was very present, a builder, a patriarch, an out-of-the-box thinker who drew up his own plan,’ says Mariëtte van Leeuwen, his third wife, who led the private school with De Jong.
Gte in a wine village
He was moved by the treatment by the Ministry of Education, says De Vos. “He’s been rehabilitated, but they hated him at the ministry for a while.” De Jong left for the south of France and later also for South Africa, where he focused on real estate. Since 2002 he lived in the wine village of Sarrians in the south of France, where he ran a gîte and entertained his guests with stories and anecdotes.
De Jong studied sociology, started a dissertation on the subculture of the truck driver, was a teacher, organizational consultant and education manager, worked at the Options Exchange in Amsterdam and led the Rotterdam oil futures market.
As a high school student, De Jong founded the band Test with Bas Adriaansen. He played bass, Adriaansen was a singer/rhythm guitarist. They won a talent contest with a mixed bag of instruments, radios as amplifiers and partly self-constructed instruments. Not much later they toured the country with professional equipment and had their own fan club.
stage animal
‘Peter was the eye-catcher, he was not afraid to do strange things on stage,’ says Adriaansen. “He jumped around and slammed his guitar against his amp.” The story goes that they completely outplayed The Outsiders at a festival. ‘It was short and intense’, says Adriaansen. After four years it was over.
They played songs by Bob Dylan, The Doors, The Animals, The Kinks, Ferre Grignard (Drunken Sailor) and a lot of own work. They released two singles, with which they made it to the tip parade. A song is on the compilation double LP Behind the Dicks 2which came out in the summer of 2021.
In January 2020, De Jong was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. After initially appearing to be cured, the illness returned in the summer of 2021. He died on January 25, with two of his four sons and Mariëtte by his side. He was 71 years old. His ashes have been scattered over the vineyards of Vacqueyras, ten minutes’ drive from his home.
‘He fought a hard battle’, says Mariëtte. ‘After each treatment he was quite ill for a few days, thanks to his iron will he kept getting up. On December 31, he got out of bed in the afternoon, still quite nauseous and weak from his penultimate chemotherapy, to bake oliebollen, because no New Year’s Eve without oliebollen, he said.’
Not so long ago, De Jong had replenished his wine stock. A gentleman dies with a full wine cellar, he thought.