MOSCOW, April 24 (RIA Novosti) – A Hague court has sentenced a former Dutch foreign ministry official to 12 years in jail for passing sensitive documents on NATO and the European Union to Russia.
A panel of judges at the Hague District Court said former Dutch diplomat Raymond Poeteray, 61, had endangered the interests of the state and its allies by passing on military and political documents, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday.
The court said in its Tuesday ruling that Poeteray had passed information to Russian agents about the civil war in Libya, EU fact-finding missions in Georgia, and Dutch peacekeeping missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan, causing substantial damage, the news agency reported, citing the presiding judge.
"He acted purely out of financial interest, to pay off his debts and allow him a certain lifestyle," the judges were quoted as saying in the ruling by Agence France-Presse.
Poeteray, who had been vice consul of the Netherlands in Hong Kong since 2008, was detained in March 2012. He denied the accusations. He was paid at least €72,000 ($94,000) between January 2009 and August 2011, AP reported.
The case of Poeteray is part of a bigger investigation into a German-based couple accused of spying for Russia.
The two, identified only by their spy names Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag, are accused of having been planted in West Germany from 1988 by the Soviet Union's KGB and later used by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, to whom they allegedly passed on the information with which Poeteray supplied them.
