“(Equal) Worthy Recovery Foundation is sounding the alarm,” reads the letter above the letter SGH drafted on Wednesday and sent to the Ministry of Finance a day later. The foundation, until recently headed by Princess Laurentien, criticized the ministry and – indirectly – also the Minister of Foreign Affairs responsible, Nora Achahbar (Benefits, NSC).
The Foundation is currently processing 2,200 requests for assistance from parents who entrusted the handling of their compensation claims to SGH. According to the foundation, processing of these applications came to a complete halt after Achahbar tightened the requirements for SGH approaches in July. The ministry has examined all damage calculations made by SGH, and requested more supporting documents than ever before. This has a huge slowing effect, according to SGH.
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Parents cannot always provide documents proving that they lost their job, had to sell their home or stopped going to school as a result of the restoration of childcare benefits. The ministry wants to see evidence of this type of damage before agreeing to a compensation calculation. SGH considers this implausible, as such evidence is often no longer available after ten or fifteen years.
Old wounds
Disbelief towards the victims also opened old wounds, the foundation said. The origins of the scandal lie in the government wrongly suspecting the victims of fraud. ‘Conclusive evidence is being requested, but cannot be provided. Acceptance has once again been placed above all else,” the foundation complained in its angry letter.
Lawyer Gerd van Atten, one of SGH’s founders, argued that the ministry should be more flexible. If not, the foundation is considering filing a mass lawsuit in court on behalf of the affected parents. Responding to the angry letter, Achahbar will hold discussions with the foundation next week. The Ministry did not wish to respond substantively to complaints and threats of legal action before this meeting.
Because discussions are now emerging regarding every compensation claim that SGH submits to the ministry, the pace has slowed down considerably. Laurentien’s daughter created the foundation to streamline stalled recovery operations for nearly 40,000 victims of the benefits scandal.
He devised an alternative method for calculating material (in)loss: parents explained in their own words what suffering the alimony scandal had caused them. For each ‘item of damage’ mentioned, the victim is awarded a fixed amount of compensation. Possible losses include debt, stress-related illness, relationship breakdown, job loss, pay cuts and eviction.
Good intention
Parents were very satisfied with SGH’s approach during the trial period. The foundation is in good faith in principle and asks parents to provide less evidence than the independent objections committee set up by the government, the Committee on Actual Damage (CWS). The foundation provided parents with an average compensation of 128 thousand euros during the pilot program, almost three times that of CWS.
Due to the scale of the damage, financial officials anonymously warned in May: the total cost of the recovery operation could reach 14 billion euros. This amount is 5 to 7 billion euros higher than the cabinet estimate at that time.
Internal evaluations show that SGH provides enormous compensation to parents, and sometimes also for setbacks that have nothing to do with alimony scandals. Therefore, the cabinet decided, with the approval of the House of Representatives, that the foundation could only continue its good work if the conditions for awards became stricter.
Princess Laurentien did not want to accept these restrictions and announced them loud and clear. As a member of the Royal House, his political positions were controversial. He therefore stepped down as chairman in August.
