An Old Story of Fraud at the EPO in the Netherlands (and How the Dutch Government Facilitated It)
We've already mentioned several other scandals where the the Dutch government engaged in fraud and passive corruption in relation to the European Patent Office (EPO), Europe's second-largest institution
Unless our plan changes, some time later today we'll write some more about the handcuffed [1, 2] Berenguer. The EPO's management is trying to keep a low profile right now.
Having just mentioned a new publication from the Local Staff Committee The Hague, let's consider a little bit of history that relates to the "Club Med" of Berenguer and his buddy António Campinos.
Is there a story behind it? "Oh yes!" said a reader to us.
"Let's talk about recruitment as from 1985. The EPO was expanding quickly and needed more examiners from all countries of the EPC. Of course it was easier to recruit in countries speaking English, French or German, one of the three official languages of the EPO. Thus, no problem for France, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, BENELUX. While recruiting in Italy Spain Portugal was more difficult because these countries didn't have a real culture for foreign languages.
"Spain was no exception and the EPO had to find a way to recruit examiners from this country. It was decided to admit examiners with a basic knowledge of 2 official languages and no knowledge at all of a third. The EPO recruited in 1988 a first batch of Spanish examiners and sent them for a crash course (2 months) at the Goethe Institute for them to learn some basic German. M. Y Fuente was in this batch.
"At the same time, the Dutch government offered to all newcomers the possibility to buy a tax-free new car within a year. The idea behind this offer is that new cars were extremely expensive at the time in the Netherlands. Customers had to pay VAT of course and additionally a luxury tax which more or less doubled the price of new cars.
"However, some newcomers didn't take advantage [nor benefited] from this offers and were approached and pressured by older colleagues (most of the ex-IIB Belgian Flemish, who were used to buy anything tax free at the time of IIB) to sell their tax-free right to buy a car. This was the matter of abuse and greed, a tax free right was usually sold for 10.000 NLG. Of course this was fraud and the cases were investigated by the customs. Some younger colleagues had serious difficulties with the customs and of course with the EPO in their probation period. The risk was high but some felt they had no choice (pressure from older colleagues).
"But one case ended in a fairy tale: a younger colleague and his girlfriend (both in site) cheated the customs and bought a extremely expensive car for one of the bosses in the branch of the Hague. The customs were very nosey in the case as it wasn't a car that a newcomer would buy for such an amount of money, even tax free.
"At the opposite of other cases, the younger colleague got full support from the Office for obvious reasons. Within a month he was promoted and transferred to the Munich site and started his career in the Technical Cooperation Department.
"In short, a superb career based on fraud." █