Beauty products seized from crooks are given to Amsterdam’s poor

A supermarket for very poor families in Amsterdam has been given goods seized by the prosecution office as apart of national pilot to use criminal proceeds to help the most vulnerable in society.

The Fris supermarket, where financially strapped people can do their shopping for free, received a donation of 10 beauty products as “a symbolic first step”.

“These are brand new products with a value of between €100 and €150, which were confiscated by the prosecution office … In this way we can give people in Amsterdam West a little help. And apart from that, it is much more sustainable than destroying them,” deputy public prosecutor Jeroen Steenbrink told the Parool.

The Fris Supermarkt in Osdorp was opened last year by local Abdelhamid Idrissi and provides basic products such as bread, vegetables, couscous, chickpeas and eggs free of charge to local families.

Idrissi has now freed up a small space for the beauty products, which include brand names l’Oréal and Rituals. “We had no luxury items. Now we can offer the people who come here something to pamper themselves with,” he told the paper.

Goods seized in police raids are normally stored for a time after which they are destroyed or, if very valuable, sold with the money going to the state.  In 2019, for example, a sale of designer handbags and shoes confiscated from crime suspects raised €232,000.

However, a few years ago the prosecution office’s came up with a scheme to turn over the proceeds of crime to people in neigbourhoods that have perhaps suffered from criminal activity.

A ship used to smuggle cocaine was donated to the Rotterdam maritime academy, while sleeping bags used by people who remove smuggled drugs from port containers were handed out to homeless people.

The message is that crime doesn’t pay, the prosecution office said.