Neelie Kroes

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Neelie Kroes  link Lobbypedia Powerbase Wikiquote (Politician)
Born	Neelie Kroes 1941-07-19 Rotterdam, Netherlands
Nationality	Dutch
Alma mater	Erasmus University Rotterdam
Spouses	Wouter Jan Smit, Bram Peper
Party	People's Party for Freedom and Democracy
European commissioner who attended all Bilderbergs from 2005 up to 2012. $$$ from companies she was regulating. Shady weapons deals with Prince Bernhard. Secret bank account in the Bahamas.

Neelie Kroes is a Dutch management consultant and former politician. She was the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda from 2010 to 2014. Previously, she was the EU Competition Commissioner from November 2004. At the same time, she had close financial ties to Lockheed Martin and Uber, among others. She was involved in shady arms deals involving Prince Bernhard.

Education

Kroes went to school in Rotterdam. In 1958 she began studying economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. In 1961, Kroes was elected president of the largest student association in Rotterdam. She was also elected to the faculty council. After graduating in 1965, she received a scholarship to the Faculty of Economics at the Erasmus University. During this time, Kroes worked in the women's organization of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and was also a member of the supervisory board of her father's heavy transport company. Kroes was elected to the Rotterdam City Council for the VVD in 1970.

Career

In 1971, Kroes was elected to parliament. She remained a member of Parliament until 1977, when she became State Secretary for Transport, Post and Telecommunications in Dries van Agt's first cabinet. She briefly returned to parliament in 1981 when her party went into opposition. From 1982 to 1989 she was Minister of Transport, Post and Telecommunications in the two Cabinets of Ministers of Ruud Lubber. During this time, she was responsible for the privatization of the Post Office and the state telephone company PTT.

From 1989 to 1991 she worked as an advisor to the European Transport Commissioner in Brussels.

In 2004, Kroes was appointed European Commissioner for Competition, succeeding Mario Monti. Her nomination was criticized for her ties to large corporations and her alleged involvement in dubious arms deals. Kroes evaded criticism by letting the EU Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services Charlie McCreevy take over her business whenever there could be a possible conflict of interest with her former employers. By January 2006, this had happened five times.

On 10 February 2010, Kroes was appointed European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. In December 2011, she hired former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg as an "advisor to the EU Commission for supporting Internet activists in authoritarian states".

She is a confidant of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Shady arms deal

In the mid-nineties, Kroes was involved in the frigate affair: the unsuccessful purchase of six Dutch frigates (a 1.2 billion euros) by the United Arab Emirates. As chairman of a consortium of Holland Signaal, Ballast Nedam and Koninklijke Schelde (supported by the Royal Netherlands Navy, the Rotterdam Port Authority and EZ), Kroes attempted to arrange an exchange of the frigates for oil supplies. When it emerged that she was also using her chairmanship to serve the business interests of a personal friend, the businessman Joop Van Caldenborgh, she was removed from her position by the government. It was not until 2011 that it became known that she had also pushed Prince Bernhard forward as a lobbyist in this deal, in violation of the agreements that The Den Uyl Cabinet had made with the prince after the Lockheed affair. The frigate affair brought Kroes into contact with Jordanian investor Amin Badr-El-Din, with whom she would lead the Bahamas company Mint Holdings some years later, that planned to acquire part of Enron.

Bahamas mailbox company

In September 2016m as part of the Bahamas leaks, it was exposed that Kroes was the director of a mailbox company called "Mint Holding" based in [[the Bahamas] from July 2000 to 2009. Among other directors was the Jordanian businessman Amin Badr-El-Din. Badreldin negotiated arms deals for the United Arab Emirates, including with the US armaments corporation Lockheed Martin. The company was founded for a business deal with the fraudulent and now insolvent US energy giant Enron.

$200,000 annually from Uber

In May 2016, one day after the "cooling-off period" of 18 months for former EU commissioners, in which they are not allowed to work as lobbyists in their old field of responsibility, Kroes became a member of Uber's "Public Policy Advisory Board". This activity is remunerated with $ 200,000 annually. However, her admission to the Uber advisory board was already arranged at a time when Kroes was still the digital commissioner. As stated in an internal e-mail from September 2014: "We are getting Neelie Kroes to join our advisory board [(mega confi[dental])". Even before the end of the "cooling-off period", Kroes was already active for Uber, although her application for an earlier activity for the group had been rejected by the EU Commission. When Uber was being investigated in the Netherlands, she apparently called several cabinet members of the Dutch government in connection with a raid in 2015, to force the regulator and the police to withdraw. She has also organized meetings of Uber representatives with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and two transport ministers. Relations with Uber were kept secret: "Our relationship with NK is strictly confidential and should not be discussed outside this group" (Uber email dated April 2015).

Other positions

She was also on the Board of Directors of Salesforce since 2016, on the board of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and a member of the Finance Committee of Rijksmuseum Fonds (Amsterdam). Kroes previously sat on the boards of Lucent Netherlands, AB Volvo and McDonald's Netherlands and was chairperson of Nyenrode University.