An acquaintance of SNCB Managing Director Sophie Dutoudoir was awarded a lucrative contact, being reimbursed even more than the director herself, Het Laatste Nieuws reports on Monday.
Between 2018 and 2020, SNCB subsidiary Ypto hired a consultant who was supposed to facilitate the transfer of the company's entire IT infrastructure to an external partner. This consultant was a British national, Hamid Aghassi, who was friends with the SNCB managing director.
He charged €2,200 a day for his full-time services. Ypto was therefore paying a bill of €44,000 per month. In all, the consultant’s annual salary was close to half a million euros, or €200,000 more than the managing director.
In a reaction sent to the Belga agency, Dutordoir said that she had put Mr Aghassi, whose “expertise in very complex IT matters at Electrabel” she “knew”, in touch with Ypto’s management at the time. “Nothing more, nothing less. It’s the most normal thing in the world to put specialists in specific fields in contact when an urgent problem arises”, she asserts.
According to her, after realising in 2018 that “an extremely important IT project involving hundreds of millions of euros of public money was in danger of going straight into the wall”, she saw it necessary to turn to external expertise.
However, the head of the SNCB did not comment on the amount of the British specialist’s remuneration. The terms of the contract for Hamid Aghassi’s services were negotiated and concluded by the management of the Ypto subsidiary at the time. Dutordoir “clearly indicated” to the subsidiary's management that “all legal and budgetary procedures had to be followed” in hiring the external consultant.
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Still on the subject of this contract, she has asked SNCB’s audit committee to launch an investigation, after being informed three weeks ago of a potential problem with an IT contract covering a period between the third quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2021.
Dutordoir hopes that the audit committee will clear up the matter by the end of August.
