Departed scout Gom van Strien deliberately concealed the fraud case from Wilders

In an interview with the newspaper PVV senator Gom van Strien explains how it all happened. On Monday he resigned from his job as a scout after NRC revealed that Utrecht University is accusing him of fraud.

‘Don’t bother Geert’

When Wilders asked him to become a scout last week, he deliberately said nothing about the fraud case. He did this in consultation with Marjolein Faber, he says.

“We discussed whether we should report this to Geert. Our conclusion was: we are not going to bother Geert with that. First let’s wait and see what happens with the report. Then nothing happened and it was never discussed again.”

“In my naivety I did not report it to Geert, but I should have done so,” says Van Strien, who is also a PVV senator. Faber did not want to say anything about the case to De Telegraaf.

Geert Wilders himself spoke on Monday of ‘a false start’. “I didn’t know what was going on either. I would have liked to know,” he said. Watch that clip here:

Van Strien maintains that he is innocent. In the interview with De Telegraaf he says that there is ‘a political settlement’.

“I was a celebrated man when I left university, I was even knighted. Everything changed when I joined the PVV shortly afterwards. People who you thought were your friends for years suddenly turn around when they see you .”

‘Made a political mistake’

He says he will not resign as senator and expects to become chairman of the PVV Senate faction if Faber moves to the House of Representatives. “That will continue as usual. I am elected by the Senate faction, that is not up for discussion. I made a political mistake, but you do not resign as a senator for that.”

After Von Strien’s departure, Wilders asked former PvdA member Ronald Plasterk as a scout. He took the job. “I said yes, because the country is calling,” Plasterk said yesterday.