One reason I don't follow the news in my country, the Netherlands, is that more often than not it's dull as dishwater. The downside is that I sometimes miss out on a bombshell of a story. Like the one I'm going to tell you now.
Frank Oranje was a Dutch notary. But not just any Dutch notary: he worked at a law/notary firm called Pels Rijcken. This firm has handled the vast majority of legal and notarial affairs of the Dutch government, at the national, provincial and municipal level for decades. They're known as the landsadvocaat - the lawyers of the State.
As a notary, Oranje personally handled the private affairs of many members of multiple Dutch cabinets, advising them on how to separate themselves from their business interests in order to avoid conflicts of interest.
In the legal/notarial community, Oranje had the nickname "Mr Integrity." He had an image of incorruptibility, of scrupulous attention to detail, of lecturing his colleagues on how to be transparent and morally upright.
Oranje is so trusted, in fact, that he attains the highest position in Pels Rijcken: he's the head of the board of directors. Such a job usually goes to a lawyer, not to a notary. But he's so well-respected that he lands the job. And as a result, he is very well off. He owns a free-standing villa in The Hague; he sponsors the arts; and generally, he's a cultured, sophisticated and well-respected man.
All the more surprising, then, that the FIOD (the much-feared fiscal police of the Netherlands) knocks on the door of that villa one morning to tell him that he's the subject of a fraud investigation, and that if he doesn't tell Pels Rijcken within one week, FIOD will. Oranje does, and the firm, shocked by this development, suspends him.
You'll notice that I wrote "Frank Oranje was a Dutch notary." That's because he killed himself on 6 November 2020, shortly after receiving the news. The reason soon becomes clear: his fraud is not some small matter, the result of a momentary lapse of judgment. It's the result of eighteen years of non-stop embezzlement, to the tune of about eleven million euros --about twelve million dollars. It's the biggest legal fraud in Dutch history (and "legal" doesn't mean "lawful" in this case).
You see, as a notary, Oranje had access to numerous bank accounts containing incredible amounts of money. These are bank accounts in which money is held temporarily. For example, if you take out a mortgage on a house, the bank obviously pays for the house. But they don't actually pay into the seller's bank account --they pay into a special account held by the notary. The notary is obviously not supposed to access that account except to pay the seller. But Oranje did dip into such accounts --all the time, moving money around from one account to another to cover his tracks, like a Dutch Bernie Madoff. He also created dozens of foundations of which he himself was the owner, and parked money into the bank accounts of those foundations. He was stealing millions.
The first mystery is why. Why did a man who was living the good life, a husband with children, and no reason to commit any crime, least of all a financial one, risk his career, his freedom, his life to embezzle money he didn't need? There's no satisfying answer. There's nothing in his past that would indicate he would turn to a life of crime --quite the opposite.
The second mystery is how. What kind of outfit was Pels Rijcken that it didn't have the proper checks and balances in place to figure this out at any point during those 18 years? Experts say that the fraud wasn't particularly sophisticated --it could have been discovered with a minimal amount of scrutiny. So how can this law firm (now just a law firm --it's dissolved its notary branch) continue to be the government's law firm even today?
The answers will be hard, maybe even impossible to find. But even what we know today is enough to teach us that blind trust in people in power, even in those who seem squeaky-clean, is always misplaced. Or as the Russians say, "Доверяй, но проверяй" - "Trust, but verify."
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