August 25, 2014

Henk Krol refuses to pay back subsidies

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 2:46 pm

gaykrant-aliFormer parliamentarian Henk Krol refuses to pay back subsidies that he allegedly used to bankroll his sex shop GayTel.

According to AD, the Ministry of Education is knocking at the door of the foundation Vrienden van de Gay Krant (Friends of de Gay Krant, a gay paper) to get their money back. The foundation has demanded that former chairman Krol pay up. The foundation has accused him of bad management. Krol refused to comment.

AD wrote in April this year that Krol used “the subsidies as his private ATM”. The subsidies were meant to build an online meeting place for teenage gays called 18min.eu. In August 2008 a supplier of IT services for Krol’s companies complained to Krol about unpaid bills, to which Krol responded: “We need new bills that aren’t addressed to Gay Krant, Best Publishing Group or GayTel, but to the foundation.”

AD is unclear about whether the 206,833 euro they mention is the entire subsidy or just the part that was stolen.

Last October Krol quit his seat in the Dutch parliament (50PLUS, party for the elderly) after allegations emerged that he had failed to pay pension premiums for Gay Krant employees.

In 2009 Krol won the State Award for Gay Emancipation for his “fundamental contribution to the acceptance of gays in the Netherlands”.

(Image: Fok.nl)

Tags: , , ,

March 10, 2012

Wifi roll-out on Dutch Rail trains progressing as scheduled

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 4:06 pm

Each month ten Dutch Rail trains are equipped with free wifi, so that all 365 trains should have wifi by the end of 2013, Webwereld reports. This is according to schedule.

Currently wifi is free. Dutch Rail still has to decide if it will start charging money for usage after 2012. The national government gave Dutch Rail a 15 million euro subsidy for putting wifi on its trains.

In 2011 the number of trains featuring free wifi doubled, but usage quadrupled. Data rate and session length have stayed the same, 9MB and 40 minutes respectively.

Webwereld, a computer news site, asked some of its users about their experiences with the service. The consensus seems to be that it is as good as one can expect from ‘free’, but not better. Complaints centre on bad connections and slow speeds. One odd complaint is that the operator, T-Mobile, seems to be using German IP numbers. Users get to see the German Google when they want to search, and Facebook warns them that somebody is trying to log into their account from Germany.

Tags: , , , , ,