Government to take action against dropped fraud cases

The federal government is to take action to prevent further incidences of major fraud trials being thrown out of court because of relatively minor procedural errors, state secretary for anti-fraud policy John Crombez (pictured) has promised.

Yesterday, we reported the dismissal of a case of a man convicted in first instance of fraud using a cash company, which had cost the treasury €75 million in lost taxes. Because the interview of one witness had not been carried out properly, the case was scrapped in the court of appeal, and the man's three-year suspended sentence overturned.

Crombez's promise follows on the vote last week in the federal parliament in favour of a proposed amendment to the law which would mean that procedural errors in a case would no longer lead automatically to the whole case being thrown out of court. The government also plans to train specialist judges to try fraud cases, which are often extremely complex technically.