A police officer has been given a five-year jail sentence for leaking confidential information to contacts in the criminal underworld.

Mark M. earned at least €80,000 from ‘subscriptions’ paid by criminal suspects to gain access to police files. The district court in Den Bosch said he had ‘damaged the image of the police force’ and ‘seriously frustrated’ his colleagues’ investigations.

M., who was not in court for the verdict, denied all the charges against him and claimed he had looked up information as a ‘hobby’. The court cleared him of a charge of bribery.

Former police chief Gerard Bouman earlier described M. as ‘the worst rotten apple in years.’ It emerged that M. was one of more than 100 police staff who were given access to confidential files despite failing screening checks.

M. joined the police as a trainee in 2009 and initially worked for CID before transferring to the traffic division. But he retained his login details for the BlueView information system and harvested information from criminal files for four years until he was arrested in September 2015.

The 31-year-old is currently living in Ukraine, his girlfriend’s native country, where he started up a telecoms and security business. He is contesting his dismissal from the police force.

M. claimed that the money he received came in the form of loans, while €4,000 that was found in his flat in Weert was linked to a business venture in Ukraine, where transactions are routinely made in cash.