Air travel for the Chief of Police is expensive due to “unnecessary” business class tickets

The former head of the National Police Service regularly transferred business class on business trips to faraway destinations, according to the Argos radio program. This is the former head of the Police Information Department, the Department of the National Information Organization.

A critically important report from the inspectorate on this service was published in January. The police chief left there last year. Unit leadership intervened after major disruptions emerged in the organization, including around managers who would keep each other above their heads.

Documents requested by Argos via Wob’s request show that the sheriff has flown overseas 35 times in over two and a half years. This is largely done with more expensive business class tickets, although economy class is the norm.

Australia

Costs for tickets, hotels and expense claims rose to more than 75,000 euros in that period. The most expensive tickets were to Australia (about 8,000 euros) and Sao Paulo (more than 5,500 euros). The flights were regularly approved without further proof by the highest national unit.

For example, Deputy Chief of Staff Willem Waliners gave permission to upgrade from economy class to business class before the flight to Brazil. It just says: “Please accept formally :)”. This is answered with the words “Business Agreement”. According to Argos, hotel costs also appear to be regularly higher than permitted.

The travel behavior would have been more efficient

“Knowing today – and an overview of total trips in 2018 and 2019, it can be concluded then that the travel behavior would have been more efficient and that it could have been directed more sharply,” says the national unit.

After indications about travel behavior, he has conducted a preliminary investigation, but it will show that no guidelines have been violated and that nothing inappropriately happened. However, there were “differences in interpretation and application of the guidelines” with regard to business trips. The guidelines have been tightened accordingly.

A cash report

The police unions NPB and ACP are dissatisfied with this. “There is still a lot of discontent with the police officers reporting this,” says NPB Chairman Jean Stroes. According to them, the reports were not sufficiently, independently and transparent to investigate.

The trips of NIA executives in January were already mentioned in a critically important report by the Justice and Security Inspectorate. He concluded that all sorts of things go wrong in the police service, mainly due to understaffing and poor leadership. The outgoing Minister Graberhaus described the conclusions as “penetrating” and said that a lot remained to be done within the organization.

The inspectorate came after complaints from police officers about favoritism, ostracism, abuse of power, and discrimination by executives.

This morning Graberhouse said he had asked the police command for an explanation of the latest news about the remarks. “I understand the questions about this, but first I want to be informed of what is going on.”