International drug trafficking does not function without corrupt officials

Mayor Femke Halsema of Amsterdam was ‘very shocked’ after an official of her municipality was arrested last Monday on suspicion of corruption. The 46-year-old official is said to have shared address details from the municipal computer systems with third parties.

Integrity violations within the government are always sensitive but this is extra intense. The information that the civil servant would have leaked concerns addresses in which explosives were later released.

Apart from the corruption, this case shows that there is structure behind the Gulf of explosions, often with homemade fireworks bombs. « With the arrest of this morning we are confronted with the tentacles of organized crime and undermining in our society, » said Halsema, who has an account of facts drawn up for the city council as quickly as possible.

The arrest of the corrupt Amsterdam civil servant does not stand on its own. An employee of the Amsterdam court was arrested in March of this year and a customs officer of Maastricht Aachen Airport followed at the end of April. They too would have shared confidential information with criminals.

Last month, an official from the tax authorities on appeal was sentenced to twenty months in prison for money laundering and sharing information from the tax authorities with criminals. More than 900,000 euros was found in the man.

And this week, the Rotterdam District Court sentenced a temporary worker from the municipality of Vlaardingen to a two -month prison sentence for publishing a number of ‘cloned’ passports. These travel documents are very popular in the criminal environment, as it turned out a similar matter In The Hague. This is because it is about official passports – only the user’s name does not correspond to the photo.

One of the customers was a man who still has to sit out a prison sentence of twelve years. « The suspect has played an essential role, coordinating and initiating, » says a spokesperson for the court. « People in the criminal circuit can continue to live their lives in this way and are facilitated by an official. »

Corruption as a revenue model

Given the seriousness of the events, mayor Halsema is shocked by corruption in her organization. But that officials of government services are corrupted by criminals, given all these examples can hardly come as a surprise.

A large number of official organizations in the Netherlands have had to deal with corruption in the last ten years: from the police to customs, and from the municipalities of The Hague and Utrecht and Vlaardingen to the Tax Authorities. In most cases these officials are corrupted for the access they have to confidential information.

This often involves personal data – such as addresses, license plates of cars or citizen service numbers. Strategic information is also obtained for the smuggling of drugs, such as container numbers, cargo letters or information about (air) port controls. In addition, corrupt civil servants provide services such as the issue of a false passport or help circumventing checks at ports and airports.

These forms of corruption are almost always in relation to the extensive drug economy in the Netherlands. Here the law of Cyrille Fijnaut has started to be called: Large -scale international drug trafficking cannot exist without corruption at companies and the government. Fijnaut, emeritus professor of criminology and criminal law, has been warning for corruption for decades.

Fewer

This week, the National Criminal Investigation Department published the figures for the year 2024. It can be deduced from this that the number of corruption cases among civil servants is falling slightly. Although it is difficult to say whether that means that there is actually less corruption.

There are criminals who focus exclusively on the corrupting of officials. They sell the information to criminal organizations

The larger number of cases between 2020 and 2022 is probably due to the cracking of two communication systems that were very popular in the criminal environment: Encrochat and Sky. Messages that were sent with this yielded particularly many useful instructions for corruption and led to a peak in the number of things.

In 2023, then general manager of the National Criminal Investigation Department Arthur van Baaren in conversation with NRC that corruption has changed structurally. The kind of matters where a civil servant leaks something to a family member or a neighbor is decreasing. But the problems of leaking to criminal networks are increasing. « Bribing officials has become a revenue model, » says Van Baaren. There are criminals who focus exclusively on the corrupting of officials. « They then pass on the information they collect in this way to one or more criminal organizations, » says Van Baaren. « That indicates how important certain information is for criminals and that they have a lot of money for that. »

Local politics

Professor Fijnaut endorses that statement. « Corruption is a major problem. But luckily, most cases we see limit civil servants in executive positions that have access to information that can be used for criminals. »

Despite his care about corruption, he points to a positive aspect in the figures. « There are currently few examples of corruption within local politics, » he explains. « That says something about the resilience of the local authority. »

According to Fijnaut, local politicians can facilitate criminal networks in completely different ways, for example with permits. « That is a form of corruption that is much more worried and the government’s authority gets much harder. »

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