The justice ministry is to introduce a new system to check the integrity of business leaders in an attempt to fight fraud, reports Thursday’s Financieele Dagblad.

The new regulation will apply from January 2010 to executives who are legally responsible for companies and foundations, including foreigners working in the Netherlands, the paper says.
The ‘integrity risks’ of executives will be analysed in a structural manner, said justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin in a letter to the chambers of commerce, the financial services watchdog, Dutch central bank, tax office and the notary association.
The existing check on people setting up companies and foundations is ‘not effective enough’ the paper quotes the minister as saying. This is clear from the cases of bankruptcy fraud, money laundering and the financing of terrorism that have emerged, the minister said.
A trial with an automated risk analysis system was successfully carried out for the justice department by Twente University this summer, the paper reports.
Parliament voted in favour of the new system to check the integrity of businesses in March 2005 (under a previous government) but its introduction has been delayed for three years, says the Financieele Dagblad.