The Dutch real estate arm of BNP Paribas also had to deal with a whistleblower. Since it was not happy with how the issue had been handled internally, the information was given to the FD, which turned it into a front-page article.
In the spring, Het Financieele Dagblad headlined, “Top real estate branch BNP Paribas leaves after integrity investigation. According to the FD, it seems that several board members of the Dutch real estate branch have been dealing in real estate in their private capacities. Whistleblowers reported this to French headquarters, which launched an investigation. Shortly thereafter, 4 of the 7 board members stepped down and 3 of them joined another real estate company.
According to BNP Paribas, the managers left “by mutual agreement. No disciplinary action had been taken. According to the whistleblowers, the case was covered up; they approached the FD. The journalists discovered that 3 of the 4 managers did indeed have a private portfolio of real estate on it and that the 4th was helpful in this. According to company policy, this was prohibited, in part because of the risk of insider trading. We do not know if an exception has been approved.
The case is remarkable. Thus, we in the Netherlands seem to have a blind spot for conflicts of interest. We assume that we are all people of integrity, we just do business and no one gets worse. It’s one of the reasons why we score well on the corruption perception index: we don’t see the corruption.
These whistleblowers are likely protected under the Whistleblower Protection Act. Go figure:
✅ Was an internal rule violated? Probably so, if permission has not been granted.
✅ Was there a concrete commitment? Yes.
✅ Was it established under a legal requirement? Probably so.
✅ Didn’t this just affect personal interests? Was there a pattern? Yes, several board members were involved.
✅ Did the whistleblowers report externally or internally and externally? At least internally. We don’t know if they also went to the authorities.
✅ Is the wrongdoing unlikely to be remedied effectively? According to BNP Paribas, no disciplinary action was taken. We doubt the prosecution would have made a case out of it.
✅ Are whistleblowers protected from harm if they go public? Probably yes, depending on the answers above. Now it is difficult to harm people who are anonymous anyway.
Six months later, the story had an unexpected tailspin. On Oct. 13, the case once again landed on the front page of the FD. In fact, the whistleblower was found to have handed over a much larger amount of data to the newspaper than originally thought. Among them were confidential data from large corporations, a private equity firm and BNP Paribas employees. This also suddenly classified the case as a data breach, which required BNP Paribas to notify its customers and the Personal Data Authority. They apparently hadn’t done that before. The information would also be of great interest to competitors. BNP Paribas now suddenly talks about a “self-proclaimed whistleblower” but says it must comply with external and internal regulations around whistleblowers.
We expect to see more whistleblower stories on the front pages of newspapers in the near future. There are some already in this newsletter. We therefore advise organizations to set up proper reporting channels, conduct proper investigations (or have them conducted), take appropriate disciplinary action and have the independent coordinator provide proper feedback to the whistleblower(s). If you want to learn more, you can take a course with us, request our white paper or subscribe to our newsletter. Or appoint us as your independent coordinator, of course.
