Declaration of forgery and embezzlement against Heerlen lawyer
he Heerlen business duo P. have reported embezzlement and forgery to the police against their former lawyer JM (47) from Heerlen. This is apparent from the declaration, which is in the possession of ZO-NWS. The aforementioned M. was sentenced to prison in another case by the court in Den Bosch last week for tax fraud and embezzlement.
According to the P. couple, the Heerlen lawyer JM is said to have pushed back thousands of euros from the residents of Heerlen in the period from August 2014 to July 2015. In addition, in the same period, he would have committed forgery when he represented the two as counsel in the reorganization of their then transport company that was at odds with PostNL.
Third-party account
“During the remediation, lawyer M. embezzled money from the third-party account by appropriating money without PostNL’s permission as us, Messrs P.s”, says the declaration of P., made to the police in Maastricht last Wednesday. .
“This trust account held money from clients, including money from P’s and PostNL, intended to liquidate our company. Mr M. did not have permission from Messrs P.r or PostNL to withdraw the aforementioned amounts of money from the third-party account.’ This involved an amount of more than 19,000 euros in total.
Forgery of documents With regard to the forgery of which the Heerlen lawyer JM is accused, the declaration states: “In order to be able to liquidate the company, it was the task of M. to make a financial offer to all creditors and to cancel the debt in this deliberate crediting.”
“Atrocious mistake”
According to P, their former lawyer was “horribly wrong”. “On May 8, 2015, I received a creditors list by e-mail. I saw that the total balance of all creditors was an amount of 284992.59 euros. I saw that something was not right because the total balance was so high,” the police further described in the official report.
At the time, theP. contacted lawyer M. and asked him about the changed total amount. M. would then have said that new creditors had been added and, according to their account, he sent his then Heerlen clients a new list of creditors by e-mail.
“Amounts creditor list devised himself”
“I saw that on this list there were names of creditors on the list that M. had devised himself. The amounts submitted were also conceived. (..) By increasing the total balance of the creditors list, the amount has become too high and PostNL has pulled out and the remediation has failed.”
“m. Deliberately falsified an existing document, namely the creditors list, in order to use it as genuine and unadulterated,” said P in the four-page statement to the police.
Reprimand
The Court of Discipline reprimanded lawyer JM in April 2017, after the residents of Heerlen had submitted a complaint about the above. “We now want him to be prosecuted for this as well,” P told ZO-NWS.
Serge Weening, counsel for JM from Heerlen, said when asked that he did not want to respond to the recently filed complaint against his client. “I’ve discussed this with my client and we don’t want to comment.”
Jail sentence
The above declaration against JM comes a good week after the lawyer in another case was sentenced by the court in Den Bosch to six months in prison, of which three months conditionally, for tax fraud and embezzlement. According to the Bossche judge, among other things, as a confidential counselor for an older woman, he wasted almost 50,000 euros.
After this conviction, Dean of the Limburg Bar Association Hans Vogels decided to file a disciplinary complaint with the disciplinary court and to request an urgent suspension for the Heerlen lawyer.
