Two members of the Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter's cabinet (Groen) have been paid by their former employers for the past two years, the Belgian postal company Bpost, L’Echo and De Tijd report.
The revelation has led to questions over a potential conflict of interest in the handing out of government contracts to the company, which is 50.1% state-owned and has recently benefited from a significant public investment.
De Sutter told both L’Echo and De Tijd that “Bpost proposed to keep the staff members on its payroll,” a mistake she claims the company now wants to correct.
Hired by De Sutter to join her cabinet in late 2020, the former postal employees had been employed by Bpost as advisors. The first had been a legal expert on the company's public purchases, with the other working as a specialist on the digitisation of postal services.
The minister also argued that parliamentarians had previously been made aware of the fact that former Bpost employees had joined her cabinet. However, parliament had not been told that the former postal advisors were still going to be paid by the postal company, which De Sutter had specially requested.
Moreover, her defence has done little to prove where these experts’ interests stood while actively taking part in contract negotiations on the government’s behalf. Indeed, these talks resulted in Bpost being handed a contract in July 2021, which saw their public funding increase by 40%.
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This had come as a surprise to the postal company, according to L’Echo, as they had expected a much lower allocation. Approved a year later in 2022, the contract will see Bpost receive €634 million across the next five years with annual payments set to rise to €129.5 million.
In response, De Sutter continued to deny a potential conflict of interest, arguing that her cabinet members had allowed this contract to include “social and sustainable elements.” However, the Flemish nationalists N-VA and far-right party Vlaams Belang, both in opposition, have asked De Sutter to provide an explanation in parliament.
The news follows a recent slew of scandals that have affected the postal company. This year alone, the company admitted that some of the profit margins on services they provided to the Belgian State were "not acceptable under applicable law".
