After repeated gaffes during the coronavirus pandemic, Dutch king Willem-Alexander is embroiled in another row this summer — over an unexplained pardon granted to a former TV presenter serving nine years in jail for cocaine smuggling.
For reasons that remain unclear, Frank Masmeijer, who had served most of his prison term in Belgium before being transferred to the Netherlands for the last 18 months, was pardoned and released this week — much to his own surprise, apparently.
Masmeijer’s high-profile lawyer, Geert-Jan Knoops, said he knew nothing about the pardon until his client was freed — adding that in his 35 years practising law he had known “only a handful” of such pardons, which must be signed by both the monarch and the minister for justice.
Even more bizarrely, the public prosecution service went public on Wednesday and revealed that it had advised against Masmeijer’s release when the prospect was drawn to its attention.
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Masmeijer said he was “gobsmacked” when told by prison authorities in Nieuwegein to pack his belongings because he was going home.
“My girlfriend came to pick me up and I told her to step on the gas in case they changed their minds,” he told Dutch media.
He added: “I’m very pleased though that the king agreed with me that my sentence was far too severe.”
Career change
Masmeijer (60) was well known in the Netherlands as an ebullient light entertainment TV show host in the 1980s and early 1990s before moving to Belgium in 1994 and becoming involved in a business running a chain of bars and restaurants.
In 2014, a Belgian court sentenced him to eight years in an Antwerp jail for his part in a large-scale drug smuggling operation involving hundreds of kilogrammes of cocaine.
When Masmeijer appealed the sentence, instead of being reduced it was increased by the Belgian judges from eight to nine years, indicating the seriousness with which it was regarded.
In the first quarter of this year there were 191 requests for royal pardons, of which 26 were granted.
Although the Dutch ministry for justice has refused to comment, Masmeijer’s pardon was signed by King Willem-Alexander and by the minister for legal protection, Franc Weerwind, recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Rome looking at how Italy pushed back against mafia-style crime.
Ulysse Ellian, an MP with premier Mark Rutte’s Liberals, said he asked Mr Weerwind for a written explanation.
The leader of the main police union, Jan Struijs — who famously described the Netherlands as “a narco-state” — said he had been “inundated” with calls from angry officers who knew first-hand how vicious “the coke trade” in Antwerp and Rotterdam could be.
“They want to know why,” Mr Struijs said. “What am I supposed to tell them?”
