Recently, the House has made it more difficult for members of government to become lobbyists after their resignation. Knops resigned as state secretary a year ago, but seems to be circumventing the lobbying ban for ministers. The two-year lobby ban only applies to maintaining contacts with ministries in their own or adjacent portfolios. Knops was State Secretary and also briefly deputy minister and then Kingdom Relations, Central Government Real Estate Agency and Cross-border Cooperation at the Ministry of the Interior. In that capacity he had little or no involvement with the Ministry of Defence. There are hardly any lobbying rules for MPs and civil servants at all.
Raymond Knops is a former military officer, he was a professional officer in the Royal Netherlands Air Force and was deployed to Iraq between November 2004 and February 2005 as an active reservist in the rank of lieutenant colonel. Six months after returning to the Netherlands, he became a Member of Parliament on behalf of the CDA. From 2010 he spoke for the group on Defense.
In 2017, Knops became State Secretary in the Rutte III cabinet. After the formation of the next Rutte cabinet in 2021, he did not return to the cabinet, but to the House. Knops was in the news negatively after a publication of NRC in The Limburger. The newspapers reported that Knops was favored in a land deal in 2010 and that this gave him an advantage of tens of thousands of euros. Knops denied and took the newspapers to court. In court, he insulted the journalists in question by calling them ‘a gang’. The judge ruled that Knops was indeed favored, but that the newspaper had to rectify the claim about the benefit of tens of thousands of euros.
Stricter lobbying rules
Although almost nine thousand Dutch people entrusted their vote to Knops in the 2021 parliamentary elections, he will not complete his term in the Chamber. Instead, he has opted for the position of board director at NIDV, he announced on Friday afternoon. The sector organization was co-founded by the government in 1984 and claims to be an important discussion partner for the Ministry of Defence. The foundation represents companies in the defense and security industry in these talks.
In the past year, the House of Representatives has taken a more critical look at ministers who walk out of The Hague and then almost immediately return to The Hague as lobbyists in the same field. For example, Cora van Nieuwenhuizen, at that time outgoing Minister of Infrastructure, was appointed director of the sector association Energie Nederland in 2021.
The European transparency watchdog Greco had already warned several times that the Dutch lobbying rules were not in order, but Van Nieuwenhuizen’s move in particular led to a lot of criticism and was more or less the starting signal for stricter lobbying rules. At the initiative of Laurens Dassen (Volt) and independent Member of Parliament Pieter Omtzigt, there was a two-year lobbying ban for ministers. For itself, the Chamber is (for the time being) a lot less strict.
