High-level corruption stories are not unknown in the heart of the European Union, but the fact that police have opened a criminal probe into the very person who was in charge of the rule of law in the entire EU until very recently adds a level of irony that you don’t see every day.
According to the reports first broken by the investigative journalist site Follow the Money and the French Le Soir on Tuesday night, December 3rd, the Belgian federal police raided several addresses linked to Didier Reynders, the former EU Commissioner for Justice, over alleged large-scale money laundering conducted for “about a decade.”
As two sources close to the investigation revealed to the journalists, the addresses included Reynders’ private homes. The ex-justice chief was brought in for questioning late into the night. The Belgian Prosecutor’s Office confirmed the existence of the probe but refused to give further comments, citing the many moving parts of the investigation.
The sources also revealed that the investigation itself has been ongoing for months, but the officials involved waited until Reynders’ term as a member of the EU Commission expired on Sunday to make their move, once the Commissioner lost his diplomatic immunity.
Representing the liberal Reformist Movement (MR/Renew), Reynders is described as being a “political heavyweight” in Belgian politics for decades. He served as finance minister between 1999 and 2011, then as foreign minister until 2019 when he was appointed Belgium’s commissioner in the first von der Leyen cabinet.
Upon being tasked by the Commission president to serve as the EU’s justice chief, he was given a mandate “to ensure that the rule of law is upheld across our Union.” Accordingly, Reynders played a central role in the rule-of-law battles between Brussels and conservative governments accused of violating EU norms—often on an ideological basis, such as in the cases of Poland and Hungary.
According to the sources of Follow the Money, the liberal politician is suspected of having laundered money for years through the Belgian National Lottery, for which he was responsible as a government official between 2007 and 2011.
As the investigating journalists explained:
Reynders is suspected of having purchased e-tickets—vouchers of 1 to 100 euros that can be transferred to an account with the National Lottery. … From that lottery account—and with cash money—Reynders is alleged to have participated in lottery games and transferred the returns, now laundered, to his private account.
The Prosecutor’s Office was eventually tipped off by both the Lottery and the Belgian Financial Intelligence Processing Unit (CTIF-CFI), the agency responsible for monitoring sketchy-looking transactions related to money laundering or terrorism financing.
According to the CTIF-CFI, suspicious operations linked to Reynders’ account for a “relatively significant amount of money” had taken place over a long period of time. It’s still unclear where Reynders got the money from, but he will now need to prove its legal origins in court.
The news of the raids perhaps does not come as such a big surprise for Belgians, as Reynders has been accused of high-level corruption multiple times before, including by a former secret service agent. Still, the politician somehow always managed to evade justice, earning him the domestic nickname “Teflon Didier.”
Nonetheless, prosecutors are taking the current case seriously and do not intend to let Reynders slip through the cracks once more. Because of that, and the high political rank of the suspect, the investigation is led by a senior general prosecutor and higher-level judge.
Waiting for his immunity to expire was also crucial for the outcome. As long as Reynders has been serving as an EU commissioner, the investigators would have needed the Commission’s approval to raid his homes, putting the secrecy of the investigation at risk and potentially allowing von der Leyen to pull strings to protect his colleague.
As a former minister, however, Reynders still enjoys a certain level of protection. If authorities wanted to arrest him, for instance, they would need parliamentary approval first.
As of Wednesday noon, neither Reynders nor the European Commission had commented on the case.
