Coolblue has lost over €400,000 to Sywert van Lienden's non-profit foundation Hulpt Groups Alliance. Coolblue chief Pieter Zwart says he is very surprised that the founders were left with millions from the deal with the government. "I was never, ever, ever told anything," he said.
Coolblue set up the webshop for the Hulproepen Alliantie foundation and handled order processing and shipping. That cost the online giant half a million euros, the Volkskrant knows. That money was not fully repaid; in the end, Coolblue wrote off 400,000 euros.
Zwart says he was under the impression that everything was done on a non-profit basis. That was the condition set by the e-tailer for providing help. "It never occurred to me that they could repay the money," Zwart tells the newspaper. "I thought: those guys quit their jobs to build something nice, then I don't want to go picking on them. I had resigned myself to the fact that we had to write off that money."
He then read in the media that Hulptroepen Alliantie still made millions from the deal via a commercial bv. "We wanted to do something good, take our social responsibility, but then a year later it turns out that a deal with the government was cooked up without us via a commercial bv."
The top executive is still in doubt about possible follow-up action against Van Lienden and his two associates. "From whom do I get the money then, and shouldn't that money go somewhere else?"
