Didier Reynders. Scandals follow EU commissioner

Didier Reynders, from the Belgian Liberal Reform Movement (MR), has been the European Commissioner for Justice since December 2019. In this regard, he has criticized the reform of the judiciary in Poland. Recently, he warned against the PiS government’s planned commission to investigate Russian influence. According to him, this is “harmful to public interest.” Meanwhile, he had to face many suspicions of corruption or conflicts of interest. In the book “The Reynders Clan” (Le Clan Reynders, 2021) by Belgian investigative journalist Philippe Engels, the politician with “the longest career in post-war Belgium” (among others, he was Minister of Finance, Defense , Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister) was haunted by a string of scandals. . Take, for example, the moment Reinders was about to become an EU commissioner. Belgian media in the form of the newspapers “L’Echo” and “De Tijd” reported that former secret service agent Nicolas Ullens de Schooten visited the prosecutor’s office when the then foreign minister was applying for a position in Brussels. . According to De Schouten, who was an employee of the services from 2007-2018, “his conscience dictated it.” In the prosecutor’s office, he testified that he had already discovered the irregularities in 2015 and had been threatened. According to his lawyer Alexis Deswaef, “attempts were made to silence him in a manner unworthy of the rule of law.” De Schoon openly accused Rangers of corruption

It is full of scams. The first is the so-called “Kinshasagate” scandal surrounding the construction of the Belgian embassy in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). As Engels wrote in his book – “In December 2011, when the Arab Spring was still underway, Japan was struggling with the consequences of the Fukushima disaster, and Belgium was reeling from another political crisis, Reinders, then Foreign Minister, had the most important task of creating embassies.” In Kinshasa. So Reynders traveled to the DRC with former railway director (NMBS) Jean-Claude Fontinoy, known as the “shadow man” in the Belgian media. Construction begins in 2014. Fontinoy was able to secure a previously unattainable position in a very prestigious location. According to De Schooten, thanks to “corrupt practices”, i.e. accepting bribes for favorable solutions to tenders and awarding contracts to suitable companies. Arms dealers and one of the DRC presidential candidates were also allegedly involved in the scandal. Bribes were extorted by selling expensive antiques and works of art at exorbitant prices. As Engels says in his book, this practice, invented by Fontino, was used in the privatization of valuable public buildings in the early 2000s when Reynders oversaw state assets as finance minister. In the consular case in Kinshasa, the trial, after temporarily gaining momentum, was halted.

Another scandal was “Fordsgate”. Because of him, Reynders considered leaving politics. In 2008, following the financial crisis, Belgian banking and insurance group Fortis went bankrupt. Fortis was split by the governments of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, and France’s BNP Paribas bought the Belgian operations after failing to promise investors an 11.2 billion euro cash injection. However, the minority shareholders went to court challenging the sale. The scandal erupted when allegations emerged that Prime Minister Yves Lederm’s government tried to influence the economic court that temporarily halted the process of liquidating the insolvent company, and lawyer Paul Thayer was due to issue an opinion. Litigation and showed understanding to small shareholders. According to the lawyer, he was called several times by “the Prime Minister’s envoy” who told him that “the government was worried about his behavior” and then to be careful because “sometimes ships sink with people on board.” Didier Reynders was supposed to be one of the ministers to receive confidential information about court proceedings. Fortisgate led to the fall of the Lettermay government on 19 December 2008. This was followed by a parliamentary committee citing “problematic links between politicians and members of the judiciary”. The Supreme Court has taken similar decisions. Fortis is now called Ageas and the statute of limitations has expired.

He found himself among the so-called “Kazakh Gate Affair”, the Franco-Belgian Affair. The central figure, however, was someone else: Belgian-Kazakh businessman Badoch Sotiv, who was accused of corruption in 1996 in connection with a contract between the Belgian company Tractebel and Kazakhstan. Tractebel paid the Kazakh government 30 million euros for access to local gas fields. An additional 55 million euros flowed into the middlemen’s pockets. Godev was one of them. Belgium had to build and manage the gas infrastructure and profit from the transport. The gas never ran. However, Sotiv, a billionaire owner of a mining company registered in Belgium, began to run into problems with the law. Like two Kazakh businessmen collaborating with him. When it looked like they might escape justice, the Belgian parliament passed a law in record time that allowed anyone accused of corruption and fraud to pay a fine instead of serving a sentence. This sparked outrage in Belgium, as the law was no doubt written for Sotiv, and under pressure from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who maintains close ties to Walloon liberals. Sarkozy was finalizing the sale of 45 helicopters to Kazakhstan and feared corruption by the “Kazakh Three” would stall the deal. Sotiv was defended by Armand de Decker, a two-time president of the Senate in Belgium, a lawyer by profession, a party colleague of Reinders, and was supposed to introduce them to each other — namely, de Becker and Sodeau, a charge Reinders vehemently denies. 10 years of investigation, proceedings. And nothing. “Three Kazakh businessmen have manipulated two founding members of the European Union for their own personal gain, and no one is shocked,” says The Rangers Clan. Godev paid 525,000. Euro fine.

In 2012 there was also scandal surrounding the non-imposition of the Libyan financial freeze. Belgium freezes some of Gaddafi’s Libya money held at the Euroclear bank in Brussels. Although the funds were used to pay for arms deliveries in the wake of the civil war in Tripoli, it appears without formal UN approval and scrutiny. Didier Reynders, the then foreign minister, has always maintained that he was not the one who gave the order to release the funds. Commissioner Reynders’ interest in the rule of law is shown on other occasions not mentioned in Philip Engels’ book. In 2012, he met with Saudi Prince Nayef Al Shalan, who was sentenced to ten years in prison by a French court in 2007 for cocaine smuggling and suspected of links to terrorist organizations in Syria. In April 2017, Belgium, under pressure from Reynders, supported Saudi Arabia’s entry into the UN Commission on Women’s Rights. Investigative journalists from the Belgian portal “Apache” accused the EU commissioner of communicating with Russia through the association “Bruno Luzato and Marine Fedier”, which is involved in the preservation of works of art and runs a museum in Uccle, Belgium. According to Apache, the organization was led by oligarch Oleg Deripaska until 2018, and was part of the Reynders association’s “circle of friends.” Today, it is led by co-founder Tatiana Monaghan, general secretary of the Russian Chamber of Commerce in Brussels and Deripaska’s aide.

And Nicolas Ullens de Schooten? Finally, he was interrogated before being summoned. Commission R, which oversees the services’ work, and according to his lawyer, told him not to deal with “political matters” anymore. In 2021, his apartment was raided and computers seized as part of a “professional undercover investigation” procedure. In March of this year, a former Secret Service agent shot his stepmother in a dispute over her aristocratic father’s inheritance. He is currently in custody. Finally, let me quote Alexis Deswief, former lawyer of de Schoon: ‘Belgium often takes the liberty of condemning behavior contrary to the rule of law in other countries. Why didn’t he do it here?”