On 21 September, 2011, a worried business owner who did maintenance on the university’s buildings for the RUG sent an email to Hans G. and six of his colleagues to warn them about the fraud. The Fiscal Intelligence and Investigative Services only discovered the fraud in 2016.
‘I understand that Mr. G. wants this affair with the receipts to continue and involve the companies that are left and willing to cooperate, such as P. I ran into P. with G. at Office Center when they were buying laptops together, probably as prizes for the fishing competition with prizes they cheated the RUG out of. Long live under the table deals!’ the business owner wrote in the email six years ago.
The employees to whom the email was sent refused to comment on the situation. At the time, the men worked as project members under Hans G.’s supervision. Two of the message’s recipients have since retired, and the other four are still employed at the RUG’s services department.
Corruption
The Public Prosecution Office (OM) suspects Hans G. of corruption of public servants. Allegedly, G., in his function as the head of the maintenance department, accepted gifts from service companies in exchange for work at the RUG. He is also said to have put his son on the payroll of installation company Mennes & Jager and engineering firm Postma without the latter actually working there. The former girlfriend of Hans G.’s son was also getting paid by Mennes & Jager without having to do any actual work.
He used shady means to bill the RUG for these costs. According to the OM, the university lost over a million euros in the case.
Fake receipts
The business owner sent the email because he felt that G. and a colleague were responsible for his company going bankrupt. He writes that he refused to participate in the fraud. His own mechanic, who had been ‘on loan’ to the university for years, was participating in the scam, according to the business owner, who says he had insufficient evidence to fire the man.
Hans G. is said to have written fake invoices for jobs that the mechanic had not actually performed. ‘G. had him moonlighting while he profited and the RUG paid for it’, according to the email.
‘The RUG is apparently awash with moonlighters’, the business owner wrote at the time. ‘And companies who refuse and [make] this clear are destroyed, it’s an upside-down world.’
The mechanic is not a suspect in the case, but the OM does suspect handyman Teun B. of similar activities.
‘New information’
RUG spokesperson Gernant Deekens says the information in the email is new to him. ‘That means I can’t respond to it. No signal of this kind ever made it to the managerial or board level at the university.’
The case has led to the university setting up a programme last year aimed at cultural change and integrity in order to minimise the chance of this kind of fraud happening again.