PVV wrongly spent €80,000 from its parliamentary budget: NRC

The anti-immigration PVV has wrongly spent some €80,000 in subsidies meant to support its 15-strong parliamentary team, the NRC said on Monday.

Last week, dissident PVV parliamentarian Louis Bontes stood down as treasurer for the parliamentary party saying money was being spent on outside initiatives and he did not want to take responsibility for it.

For example, the ‘resistance tour’ organised this year to protest at cabinet policies cost €14,300, money which came from the parliamentary subsidy pot, the NRC said.

Two other bills have been criticised by the official auditors Deloitte: €22,705 for lawyer Bram Moszkowicz for a case brought by party founder Geert Wilders against the European emergency fund in 2012, and €42,615 for fighting the local council elections in 2010, the NRC said.

Parliamentary chairman Anouchka van Miltenburg will have final say on whether the rules have been broken, sources told the paper.

The PVV gets between €1.5m and €2m a year to spend on its parliamentary operation. According to the Volkskrant, parliament does not fall under freedom of information legislation, making it impossible to find out exactly what the money is spent on.

Because the PVV has no members apart from Wilders, it is not eligible for other financial support from the state which other parties get for campaigning and running their party machine.

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