Belgium Is Finally Getting Serious About Financial Crime. And Not a Moment Too Soon.
- Editor
- 14 hours ago
- 5 min read
The government's plan to establish a dedicated financial prosecution unit is exactly what Belgium's justice system has needed for years. Those who are familiar with the Nyrstar case know precisely why.
Belgian Minister of Justice Annelies Verlinden (CD&V) and Ismaël Nuino (Les Engagés), chair of the Parliamentary Justice Committee, announced the creation of a dedicated financial prosecution division within the federal public prosecutor's office. The announcement marks a turning point in the way Belgium intends to tackle financial crime.
For the minority shareholders of Nyrstar, who have spent years fighting for justice this is profoundly welcome news. It is not, however, a surprise. It is the logical consequence of a growing recognition, across Belgian political and legal circles, that the existing system is structurally underpowered to handle the complexity, scale, and sophistication of modern financial fraud.
What the reform actually means
The new financial division will be embedded within the federal prosecutor's office and staffed by 30 dedicated personnel: ten magistrates, ten legal officers, and ten seconded tax officials. They will be working under a deputy federal prosecutor. Four of the ten magistrates must hold demonstrable expertise in financial or fiscal matters.
The unit's existence and minimum staffing will be written directly into law, a safeguard against future governments quietly letting it wither through budget cuts or reassignment. This is important. Belgium has a history of announcing specialised enforcement capacity, only to see other parts of the investigative chain fail to keep pace.
"In the past, we often made the mistake of strengthening certain entities, only for other services to be unable to follow. We have learned from that."
ANNELIES VERLINDEN, MINISTER OF JUSTICE
That recognition matters. The reform is therefore not just about adding 30 people at the prosecution level. It encompasses hundreds of additional hires across the full chain: 101 specialised financial investigators at the federal police, 77 additional personnel at courts and tribunals nationwide — including dedicated financial chambers at every correctional court and court of appeal in Belgium — and, in the future, a specialised investigating judge for financial crime in every judicial district.
30 NEW STAFF AT THE FINANCIAL PARKET
101 SPECIALISED FEDERAL POLICE INVESTIGATORS
77 ADDITIONAL COURT & TRIBUNAL PERSONNEL
€175M TARGETED ANNUAL RECOVERY BY 2029
Why this matters beyond criminal asset recovery
The political narrative around this reform has rightly focused on disrupting organised crime and recovering stolen public money. But Nyrstar Collective has always argued that the mandate must extend further. Shareholders have built a case for the protection of investors who placed their trust in a publicly listed company, only to find themselves victims of opaque corporate manoeuvres they had no means to detect or challenge.
Financial crime does not only damage the state. It damages markets. It destroys confidence in the integrity of public capital allocation. When investors cannot trust that listed companies are held to meaningful legal standards, the entire edifice of market-based investment weakens. That is a public harm as real as any theft from the treasury.
Minister Verlinden has previously cited the Nyrstar case as a concrete example of why the public prosecutor's office needs greater resources in complex financial dossiers. The Nyrstar case has indeed illustrated this lack of resources with painful clarity. After years of investigation, the Brussels public prosecutor's office concluded that critical elements had simply not been investigated. This was not through negligence, but through a lack of means.
On the other hand, the Antwerp criminal investigation continues. Given the thoroughness of the investigation, minority shareholders are convinced this will be a game changer.
From societal mission to systemic change
From the outset, Nyrstar Collective has pursued two parallel objectives. The first is specific: the restitution of losses suffered by minority shareholders who were, in our view, systematically deceived. The second is broader: ensuring that the Belgian legal and regulatory framework is robust enough to prevent this kind of case from arising again. And when it does arise, prevent it from dragging on for a decade or more without resolution.
Nyrstar Collective remains publicly engaged, having consistently pointed to the structural gap in the system: Belgium's financial enforcement apparatus, however well-intentioned, has operated with resources wildly disproportionate to the complexity and scale of the cases it is asked to handle. That gap has been exploited, consciously or otherwise, by those with the legal firepower and financial depth to outlast the system.
The government's reforms directly address this gap. A reinforced financial prosecutor’s office, properly staffed and legally entrenched, means that future investigations will not stall by lack of manpower. Specialised financial chambers at every level of the court system implies that dossiers will be handled by judges who understand business financials, which is key when confronted with structured finance instruments or complex corporate restructurings.
The piece that remains missing: the FSMA
We would be less than candid if we did not identify the one significant gap that this reform, welcome as it is, does not yet fill. Effective prosecution requires effective pre-investigation detection and referral. In financial markets, that role belongs to the FSMA, Belgium's financial market supervisor.
During a parliamentary hearing last year, the FSMA acknowledged that its mandate to intervene could be broadened. This would give the financial watchdog more options, including the ability to take direct legal action in cases of alleged corporate governance breaches by listed companies. Such a broader mandate would require changes to the current legislative framework. However, since the hearing in the parliament’s Finance Commission, no significant progress has been made.
Meanwhile, the FSMA's handling of the Nyrstar case has been surprisingly ambiguous. A recent ruling by the 'Marktenhof' highlighted that judicial oversight of FSMA decisions remains structurally constrained: courts cannot reassess the merits of FSMA determinations, only their procedural regularity. The result is an accountability gap that, in a well-functioning rule-of-law state, should not exist.
If the FSMA's mandate is expanded and if its new leadership demonstrates genuine willingness to use the powers it already has, the ecosystem being created by Minister Verlinden's reforms could be genuinely transformative. A supervisor that detects early, refers promptly, and cooperates fully with a well-resourced public prosecutor's office, that is how cases like Nyrstar get addressed in months rather than years or decades.
A rule-of-law state that earns its name
The reforms announced on 12 May are not the end of a journey. They are the beginning of a structural shift in the way Belgium approaches financial crime. The language being used in political debate has evolved markedly: the phrase "financial crime" is no longer treated as a specialist technicality but as a mainstream political and economic priority.
That evolution reflects, in part, the work done by those who refused to accept that a €2 billion disappearing act on a regulated stock exchange was simply the cost of doing business. It reflects the persistence of Nyrstar’s minority shareholders who pursued the case through Belgian courts, political advocacy and public debate when the easier path was to absorb the loss and move on.
We are not done. The criminal investigation in Antwerp continues. Our civil proceedings continue. Our commitment to accountability on behalf of minority shareholders who trusted the Belgian market continues. But today, we can say something we have not always been able to say with confidence: the Belgian state appears to be building the infrastructure necessary to take financial crime seriously. That is worth acknowledging.